Episode Details

Recently, a series of papers were published in Nature and Nature journals illuminating the physiologic effects of exercise from an NIH initiative called MoTrPAC. To understand the wealth of new findings, I spoke with Professor Euan Ashley, who, along with Matt Wheeler, heads up the bioinformatics center.

Earlier this week, Stanford announced Euan Ashley will be the new Chair of the Department of Medicine. He has done groundbreaking work in human genomics, including rapid whole genome sequencing for critically ill patients and applying the technology for people with unknown diseases. A few years ago he published The Genome Odyssey book. As you’ll see from our conversation, he has also done extensive work on the science of exercise.

Video snippet from our conversation. Full videos of all Ground Truths podcasts can be seen on YouTube here. The audios are also available on Apple and Spotify.

Transcript with audio and external links

Eric Topol (00:06):

Well, hello, it's Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and I'm really delighted today to welcome my friend, Euan Ashley. He is the Roger and Joelle Burnell Chair of Genomics and Precision Health at Stanford. He's done pioneering work in genomics, but today we're going to talk about something very different, which he also is working in exercise. Exercise the cover of a Nature paper in May regarding this MoTrPAC, which we're going to talk about this big initiative to understand the benefits of exercise. But before I hand it over to Euan, and I just want to mention his description of the paper that he posted to summarize started with, “Exercise may be the single most potent medical intervention ever known.” So Euan welcome.

Euan Ashley (01:01):

Yeah, well, great. It's wonderful to be here, Eric, and so nice to see you.

Eric Topol (01:06):

Yeah. Well, we have a lot to talk about because exercise is a fascinating topic. And I guess maybe we'd start with the MoTrPAC, which is an interesting acronym that you all came up with. Maybe tell us a bit about that with the 800 rats and the 2,400 people and the 17,000 molecules, there’s a lot there.

Euan Ashley (01:24):

Right, right. Yeah. Well, first of all, of course, before you do any scientific study, especially with a large number of people in a consortium, you need a good acronym. So that was where we started with the idea was to focus on the molecular transducers of physical activity. As you pointed out there at the beginning, we really don’t have a more potent medical intervention, especially for prevention of disease. I mean, it’s just such a powerful thing that we have, and yet we don’t really understand how it works. And so, the

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