Episode Details

Funding for the NIH and US biomedical research is imperiled at a momentous time of progress. Exemplifying this is the work of Dr. Anna Greka, a leading physician-scientist at the Broad Institute who is devoted to unlocking the mysteries of rare diseases— that cumulatively affect 30 million Americans— and finding cures, science supported by the NIH.

A clip from our conversation

The audio is available on iTunes and Spotify. The full video is linked here, at the top, and also can be found on YouTube.

Transcript with audio and external links

Eric Topol (00:06):

Well, hello. This is Eric Topol from Ground Truths, and I am really delighted to welcome today, Anna Greka. Anna is the president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) this year, a very prestigious organization, but she's also at Mass General Brigham, a nephrologist, a cell biologist, a physician-scientist, a Core Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and serves as a member of the institute’s Executive Leadership Team. So we got a lot to talk about of all these different things you do. You must be pretty darn unique, Anna, because I don't know any cell biologists, nephrologists, physician-scientist like you.

Anna Greka (00:48):

Oh, thank you. It's a great honor to be here and glad to chat with you, Eric.

Eric Topol (00:54):

Yeah. Well, I had the real pleasure to hear you speak at a November conference, the AI for Science Forum, which we'll link to your panel. Where I was in a different panel, but you spoke about your extraordinary work and it became clear that we need to get you on Ground Truths, so you can tell your story to everybody. So I thought rather than kind of going back from the past where you were in Greece and somehow migrated to Boston and all that. We're going to get to that, but you gave an amazing TED Talk and it really encapsulated one of the many phenomenal stories of your work as a molecular sleuth. So maybe if you could give us a synopsis, and of course we'll link to that so people could watch the whole talk. But I think that Mucin-1 or MUC1, as you call it, discovery is really important to kind of ground our discussion.

A Mysterious Kidney Disease Unraveled

Anna Greka (01:59):

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it's an interesting story. In some ways, in my TED Talk, I highlight one of the important families of this story, a family from Utah, but there's also other important families that are also part of the story. And this is also what I spoke about in London when we were together, and this is really sort of a medical mystery that initially started on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, where it was found that there were many families in which in every generation, several members suffered and ultimately died from what at the time w