Lab Animal

In this month's interview, we're chatting with Sarah Moore, a veterinarian and researcher at the Ohio State University. Sarah studies spinal cord injury, an often debilitating condition that affects thousands of people as well as pets each year. We talk about Sarah's work and why she thinks the search for treatments to help our canine companions living with spinal cord injuries - termed spontaneous dog models - could also help human patients.

Ever wonder how well the phenotype of your mouse model would hold up in the real world? In this interview, Andrea Graham, an evolutionary ecologist at Princeton University who studies host-parasite interactions , describes her team's effort to dirty up clean lab mice by setting them free on a farm in New Jersey. Their goal is to understand how a little time with Mother Nature changes their microbiomes and genotype-phenotype relationships.

In this podcast we talk with Dr. Patrick Duffy, Senior Investigator at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Chief of the Laboratory of Malaria Immunology and Vaccinology. We discuss his work in both basic and clinical research in malaria, how he balances lab research using animal models with his human studies directly testing malaria vaccines, and his history of research overseas in areas directly impacted by malaria. He also discusses his interests in malaria in pregnancy, a severe form of malaria that has been a main thrust of his research interests for decades.

An interview with Laura Kahn , co-founder of the One Health Initiative, and author of "One Health and the Politics of Antimicrobial Resistance". Laura describes the gaps between human, animal, and environmental health, and the importance of bridging them through the One Health concept.

Koen Van Rompay discusses the history of HIV/AIDS research, the importance of primate models in developing powerful anti-retroviral therapies, and his global health work to help fight stigma and the social barriers that prevent us from halting HIV/AIDS transmission.