Dr. Stephen Waxman is a professor of neurology, neuroscience and pharmacology at Yale. His research on pain helped pave the way for a newly approved, non-addictive pain drug called suzetrigine. On today’s show, he explains why he thinks suzetrigine is a promising step, but why much more work is needed to develop better pain drugs. He also gets into his work on ion channels—critical to unlocking the pain puzzle— and a rare condition known as Man on Fire syndrome.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Mapping the Unmappable
 Philipp Kandal is the chief product officer of Grab, an app that serves several countries across Southeast Asia. Two of Grab’s main businesses are delivery and mobility – like a combination between Instacart and Uber. And maps are at the core of its business. On today’s show, Philipp talks about improving online maps for places like Southeast Asia, where streets are often winding, narrow, and harder to access than those in the US and other developed countries.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Reinventing Blood
Dr. Allan Doctor is the co-founder and chief scientific officer at Kalocyte, a company that is developing dried red blood cells that can be rehydrated and used in medical emergencies. On today’s show, Dr. Doctor explains the complex science behind artificial blood, and how this innovation could help save millions of lives.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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The AI Pioneer Developing New Kinds of Medicine
Jakob Uszkoreit is the CEO and co-founder of Inceptive, a biotech start-up. He’s also a co-author of “Attention is All You Need,” the paper that created transformer models. Today, transformers power chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. They’ve also led to breakthroughs in everything from generating images to predicting the structure of proteins. On today’s show, Jakob talks about the invention of transformer models. And he discusses how he’s using those models to try to invent new kinds of medicine, with a particular focus on RNA. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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A Billion-Dollar Bet on Carbon Removal
Nan Ransohoff is the head of climate at Stripe. The company is known mainly for facilitating online payments, but it’s become a key driver of the nascent carbon-removal industry. On today’s show, Nan explains how she used a clever economic idea to get companies to spend $1 billion on carbon removal. And she talks about the different approaches startups are pursuing to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Every week on What's Your Problem?, former Planet Money host Jacob Goldstein talks with entrepreneurs and engineers tackling the biggest challenges at the forefront of technology. How do you make a trip to space as routine as a plane flight? How do you turn solar energy into clean fuel? How do you use AI to stop deadly infections before they spread? We hear a lot these days about how the world is getting worse. What's Your Problem? learns from the thinkers and doers trying to make our future better.
iHeartMedia is the exclusive podcast partner of Pushkin Industries.
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