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Science

Hard Drugs

by Saloni Dattani & Jacob Trefethen
ScienceHealth & FitnessMedicine

Today: #157 in Science on our combined chart.

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#140 Pulse 5

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DateApple Podcasts
Oct 3#140

About the show

Hard Drugs is a show by Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen about medical innovation: how to speed it up, how to scale it up, and how to make sure lifesaving tools reach the people who need them the most. It is brought to you by Works in Progress.

Latest episodes

  • Can we switch off diseases?

    October 2, 2026 · 1 hr 16 min

    What if treating diseases was as simple as telling your cells to stop making a harmful protein? That’s the premise of siRNA, a technology that silences genes without changing DNA. Just a single dose of siRNA can last for months. Better, it…

  • Are miracle drugs hiding in plain sight?

    July 24, 2026 · 2 hr 32 min

    GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro have transformed the treatment of obesity as well as diabetes, help treat heart disease, kidney disease, sleep apnea, and maybe even Alzheimer’s. But they are far from the only medicine with more than…

  • Inventing the second malaria vaccine with Katharine Collins

    May 27, 2026 · 2 hr 15 min

    Malaria is caused not by a virus or bacterium, but by a complex, shape-shifting parasite that has evolved alongside us for millennia. This has made vaccine development a brutal challenge. In this episode, Jacob and Saloni are joined by…

  • Should everyone be taking statins?

    February 27, 2026 · 2 hr 55 min

    Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, but it’s also one of medicine’s biggest success stories. Since the 1950s, the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease has fallen dramatically, thanks to public health efforts…

  • The first cancer vaccine

    December 22, 2025 · 2 hr 59 min

    Hepatitis B is a tiny virus that causes hundreds of thousands of deaths from liver disease and cancer each year. The vaccine against it became the first of many milestones: it was the first viral protein subunit vaccine, the first…

  • The history of vaccines

    November 26, 2025 · 2 hr 6 min

    Before vaccines became routine, they were risky experiments. In this episode, Jacob and Saloni travel back to the world of smallpox, cowpox, and cow-based “vaccine farms” to see how scientists stumbled toward the first vaccines against…

  • Will AI solve medicine?

    October 29, 2025 · 4 hr 35 min

    Artificial intelligence is transforming how we discover and develop new medicines. But how far can it really take us? In this episode, Jacob and Saloni trace the path of drug development from discovery to testing, manufacturing, and…

  • The art of protein design with AI

    October 15, 2025 · 1 hr 0 min

    What if you could design a protein never seen in nature? In this episode, Jacob and Saloni explore how researchers are using new tools like RFDiffusion, AlphaFold, and ProteinMPNN to ‘hallucinate’ entirely novel proteins: designing them…