Reprogrammed: A biotechnology Podcast

This interview followed a Keynote speech Dr. Deza Leon gave at the 2026 Hawk Talks Event at KU Edwards Campus on May 1.

This episode looks at two papers, one a 2019 paper by Hassett et al. about optimizing Lipid Nanoparticles specifically for intramuscular mRNA vaccines. And a second, Laczko et al., from 2020, that shows what kind of immune responses you can get from ... more

This episode discusses the 2005 Kariko et al. paper about RNA immunogenicity.

In this episode, we explain why influenza is such a persistent threat—its segmented RNA genome enables antigenic drift and reassortment-driven “shift,” letting it change faster than traditional vaccines can be manufactured. We thenwalk through Petsch... more

mRNA vaccines: when the call is coming from inside the house, discusses how the immune system knows what's going on inside of cells and how specific that knowledge is. This episode explains MHC Haplotype and how MHC restriction limits the targets of ... more

This episode explores an early mRNA vaccination study showing that injected RNA can be injected into the body, be translated into protein that is presented on MHC class I to generate an antigen-specific cytotoxic T-cell respons. This discussion highl... more

This week on Reprogrammed, Jack and Annie tackle a key limitation in CAR T cell therapy for solid tumors: poor trafficking to the tumor site. Centered on the 2010 study by Craddock et al., this episode explores how engineering T cells to express the ... more

In this episode, we examine the work of Roselli et al.1, who explore a critical frontier in CAR T cell engineering: how to build T cells that don’t just kill tumors effectively, but also survive, persist, and adapt in the complex and hostile environm... more