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Hey there Sam here. Just wanted to pop in before we get started and say thank you for hanging out with us every week. You make this so worthwhile and we genuinely want to know what's on your mind. So drop us a rating and review wherever you listen and tell us what science topics are living rent free in your head these days. We might just cover your burning interest in the next episode. Thanks. Your immune system already knows how to monitor and even attack cancer cells. The problem is, cancer cells are really good at slipping past that defense. That is where car T cell therapy comes in. Instead of targeting cancer cells directly, it levels up immune cells to give them an advantage over the cancer. And the field is moving fast. I'll talk with biomedical engineer Dr. Shreya Shukla to find out more. We're also tackling why everyone is suddenly obsessed with peptides. You can't open social media without someone promising that peptides are the magic fix for nearly everything. Your skin, your joints, your sleep, your hair. So we're wading through all that noise to figure out what peptides actually do and what they don't. But first, a weird but wonderful question. How do pigeons navigate when they can't see the sun? Welcome to Curiosity Weekly. I'm Dr. Samantha Amin. A few things in modern life are certain death, taxes and dubious claims from wellness influencers on social media touting the next miracle drug and the latest product captivating those trying to optimize their health peptides. But is this new fad actually supported by science? Well, the hype is certainly real. Nature News reported that Google searches for peptides rose from 1.3 million per month in 2024 to around 8 million per month in 2026. Peptides themselves are nothing new. Insulin is a peptide, as are the GLP1s used for weight loss. They're naturally occurring short chains of amino acids that perform essential functions in the body, engineered into highly tested medications. But these wellness claims are typically being made about experimental synthetic peptides and how effective they are for things like wrinkles, healing injuries, anti aging, boosting metabolism, better sleep, muscle definition. I mean, there's even one that apparently stimulates melanin production to make you look more tanned. I don't know. Recently there's been a massive influx of people purchasing the drugs online and injecting themselves with them. Peptides might seem to be an attractive therapeutic because they're small and targeted, giving them fewer off target interactions with different molecules in the body. And I mean, there are currently about 100 FDA approved peptide medications, with roughly 150 more going through clinical trials. But experts say the issue here is a lack of data. Unregulated peptides being sold online often haven't been tested in humans, and they can be manufactured in labs with zero oversight. They haven't been submitted to a regulatory body to review the long term safety or how well the peptides work. And there also isn't an external organization testing for purity or contamination in the labs themselves. That creates a risk of the presence of endotoxins in the formulas, not to mention unknown effects of injecting yourself with an untested chemical compound. Take BPC157 for example. It's a common peptide that's typically manufactured for laboratory research to study tissue repair in animal models not intended for people to buy and inject themselves. Researchers worry that without clinical trials in humans, we can't be sure if the benefit, if any, outweighs the risks. Also, peptides that occur in the body are fine tuned to what we need, and throwing those numbers out of whack can have some pretty disastrous consequences. Health Canada warns they can cause hormonal imbalances, issues with blood sugar, liver or kidney damage, and blood clots, along with plenty of other risks to do with a lack of regulation in producing the compounds. One preprint study found that out of 6,000 samples, roughly 40% or up to 70%, depending how you defined it, didn't meet basic purity and dose standards. The US Government, along with pharmaceutical companies, are taking steps to adjust regulations in the industry. So despite their popularity and what wellness influencers are saying on TikTok the experts agree the potential benefit of injecting yourself with unregulated chemical compounds is not worth the potential and known risks. Our trip up the coast was perfection.
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Your immune system already knows how to monitor and even attack cancer cells. The problem is that cancer cells are really good at slipping past that defense. That is where car T cell therapy comes in. Instead of targeting cancer cells directly, it levels up immune cells to give them an advantage over the cancer. And the field is moving through fast. To help us understand what's behind all the headlines and exciting hype, we brought in an expert, Dr. Shreya Shukla. Shreya is a biomedical engineer who co founded a T cell therapy company and now works to make cell therapies at scale. Welcome to the show. Shreya thank you, Sam.
C
Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
D
We're thrilled to learn more about CAR T cell therapies because they're in the headlines a lot. And they were first approved back in 2017 by the FDA. But the fact that we still see them in the news tells us something cool must be going on. So can we start just like, what is CAR T therapy and what is it currently being used to treat?
C
So it's been an amazing decade of progress in the CAR T cell space. So CAR T cells are essentially engineered T cells. T cells are one of the coolest cell types in the body. They are part of the immune system. What they're really, really good at is finding, seeking and killing any infected cells or abnormal cells like cancer. It was the cool invention a decade ago that first showed proof of concept in the clinic was that one can engineer these immune cells called T cells with synthetic receptors, which are really cool proteins that scientists can design called chimeric antigen receptors, or car. What these synthetic proteins help do is recognize the surface of cancer cells and that really then enables the T cells to become trained to fight and kill cancer in the body. It's very, very exciting. Yeah.
D
The engineering is to change the proteins on the outside of the T cell so it can become better at finding and ideally killing the cancer. Is that right?
C
Exactly. That's exactly right, yes.
D
Okay. And so what types of cancers is it currently used to treat?
C
So this first wave of innovations has primarily been in the blood cancer space. So these are cancers that are also called liquid cancers. So for example, all or myeloid leukemias. These are cancers that float inside the body. CAR T cells have been very, very good at killing cancer of this form. What is the next wave that's coming is CAR T cells for solid tumors. These are three dimensional tumors which are harder to penetrate and harder to kill. There's more engineering and innovation happening to target these solid tumors.
D
Yeah, it's interesting, like the blood cancers, because those cells are kind of floating around and immune cells are also floating around. They're part of the blood just because of that, that they're easier to find and get to. Whereas a tumor is like it's a hunk of cells. Right. You can't just get to the inside.
C
Yeah. It's also so challenging because say these tumors grow at different rates in different people's bodies. They're not homogeneous, they're more heterogeneous. They may not be vascularized very efficiently,
D
so they don't have access to Blood.
C
Exactly. And people are still trying to understand the true cancer stem cells and some of these solid tumors that cause these tumors to grow, really targeting the most difficult to reach cancer cells and engineering these cells to survive in such hard, toxic environments, that's sort of the challenge in the field currently.
D
Okay, you brought up something there. That the ideal target for these T cells, they're not just trying to find any cell in a tumor or any cell in the cancer. They're trying to find cancer stem cells. Can you explain a little more about that logic? What are the T cells targeting, say, in blood tumors?
C
It's been. Or liquid tumors. It's been really easy in some cases where all of the cancer cells express the same levels and high levels of a certain protein. So those are easier to identify on the cell surface of cancer.
D
I like to think of it as they're all wearing the same mask.
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Yeah.
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Or the same coat or something. You can easily find them in a crowd.
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Exactly.
C
But with solid tumors, it's been more challenging because either these proteins on the cell surface are not on every single cancer cell, or they could be also on healthy tissue. How do you train your immune cell to say, hey, don't kill this cell because this is healthy. Kill this cell because this is cancerous. The logic gating that then starts to appear in these cars gets more challenging. So you have to say, hey, if only a cell expresses A and not B, then kill. And identifying those sort of combination of proteins on the ones that really cause your cancer cell to grow or tumor to grow, that's the hard part.
D
So the cells that are causing cancer, they don't necessarily look all that different, at least on the surface, than our regular cells. And so the engineering challenge is how do you tell the T cells who to attack and who to find and what to look for? Right. Like, what's the right coat that a cell needs to be wearing in order to kill it? And obviously you don't want it to attack heart cells or lung cells or a healthy blood cell. So that's like where the hard part is. Right?
C
That's perfectly explained. Yeah. And sort of the levels of expression also matters. So say maybe this cancer cell is wearing a full blown jacket. So you can really identify all over the body versus some cancer cells are only wearing tiny gloves. The levels of expression are low. So how do you find those tiny gloves in a body made of billion cells? That's the fun part. I don't know if that was helpful.
D
Very cool. We talked about what these engineered cells are looking for. In order to find the cancer. But let's talk about the T cells themselves. The cells that are actually getting, like, searching and killing of the bad cells. Why are T cells able to be used in this way? Like, why are they so cool? What do you love about them?
C
T cells one can think of in many different ways. Maybe they are the soldiers of the body. So what they are so cool at is orchestrating an immune response. So, for example, there may be only one T cell that recognizes a particular, say, infection. For example, it will quietly live in your lymph nodes in your body for years and years, decades even. Then suddenly, when the body sees, hey, I have the same infected cell, There is one T cell named Bob that can recognize this particular infected cell. Bob will start becoming active again in the lymph node and start multiplying and growing and become a full blown army that then goes through your body and finds those infected cells and starts to kill them. They're really, really cool soldiers. Those are, say, what we call cytotoxic T cells or CD8 positive T cells. Then there's the kernels of the immune system, the CD4 positive T cells. They really tell people what to do. They say, hey, CD8 killer T cells, go do this. They recruit the NK cells. They sort of orchestrate the immune response. And really, I think that's fascinating.
D
So they're the ones who are just like hiding out, waiting, and then they kind of recruit. They not only clone themselves kind of, or multiply themselves, but then recruit others to come and attack other immune cells. Exactly. So then why do we need to engineer them if they're already so good at it?
C
In certain cases they need some help. So perhaps they don't necessarily recognize that, hey, this is not a healthy cell. This is actually a cancer cell. So even for example, the blood tumors I described or the liquid tumors where car T cells have been really efficacious, they target a protein called CD19. And CD19 is actually also expressed on our healthy B cells in the body, which is another kind of immune cell. So in that particular case, you are telling the immune system and saying, hey, actually, you know what, this protein is also expressed in a healthy cell. But regardless, I want you to go and start killing because it is highly expressed on this liquid tumor. And those patients still require, because you end up killing their healthy B cells as well, they require IDG infusions for the rest of their lives. In some cases, you are helping them along, but you are also maybe telling them to do something they wouldn't necessarily do. That's where the engineering comes in, or the bioengineering.
D
Leveraging the body's own ability to, to kill dangerous cells is very exciting in and of itself. What does this look like in practice? What does the process of a CAR T therapy involve?
C
This first wave or this past decade approach has been to take a cancer patient's blood. You harvest blood from the cancer patient and you enrich and select for these immune cells or these T cells. And then in a clean environment, we then engineer the patient's immune cells to express the scar that can target cancer. And we let the cells grow for a bit so there's enough cells to put back in the patient. We freeze them down, and then those frozen cells get shipped back to the patient at the hospital where the patient is in an ICU environment. These cells are then thawed and infused back into the patient. This first wave approach, we have seen side effects that can occur when these cells are infused back. There's a huge cytokine storm, which is basically an inflammatory response to so many immune cells coming into the body and suddenly being very activated and killing the cancer. Now doctors have figured out ways to mediate and control this response, the storm that happens in the patients. Typically, this approach has led to on average, say, 50 to 70% remission in cancer patients. In certain cases, this cancer can come back. This has been the first wave approach. Now we are in a very, very exciting time where there's different alternate approaches that are also being explored in clinical trials. For example, one can take a healthy patient or a healthy donor's immune cells and engineer those and freeze them down. And then those can be given to multiple patients at a time. You start driving down cost of goods and cost of manufacturing. And another exciting approach that's been explored right now is in vivo CAR T cells. Instead of engineering living drugs, as we've been talking about, one can infuse, say, constructs that can go inside the body of the patient and engineer immune cells inside the patient's body to do the very same thing. So that's sort of the current wave of excitement in the space. There's a lot of investments happening for this in vivo approach, and it's very, very early days. So we have to remain neutral and cautiously optimistic. The clinical data is just coming back, so we can't expect home runs just yet. But the first wave of data is very, very promising for this alternate approach as well.
D
So originally we were taking T cells from the patient themselves, engineering them, putting them back in the leveled up T cells Then you could start to get T cells from donors. And then this third wave you're talking about, or third approach is to edit them live in someone's body. That also seems kind of scary because you gotta make sure you're editing the right cell at the right time.
C
It's very, very fun space right now where, say, the pros are that you don't have to ex fever or engineer cells outside the body, which can be a very expensive process. The cost per dose is very, very high. You're talking about $350,000 to half a million. In some cases. The costs are very high to do this outside the body in an autologous or patient derived way for this in vivo approach. Now the costs are much lower because in some cases you're using things like virus engineered, virus, this is safe, or LNPs, which are another new approach to deliver these gene editing tools inside the body. But now the cons are again, you're targeting cells inside a patient's body. These are immune cells that have gone through a lot. These patients typically go through chemotherapy, radiation. They've gone maybe perhaps to multiple lines of treatment to help treat their cancer. The immune cells you're targeting are depleted or exhausted. More terminally differentiated engineering, those kind of cells can always be challenging. And also finding them in the body can be challenging because we talked about those cells residing in lymph nodes in the body. Perhaps there are some next to the tumor.
D
Now, we've talked a lot about cancer. But beyond cancer, there are something like 200 CAR T clinical trials underway for things like autoimmune diseases. I read this case study from April 2026 about a woman with three autoimmune diseases who, who was symptom free over a year after a CAR T therapy. How are autoimmune CAR T therapies different than the cancer challenge?
C
I think it's a very fascinating area as well. Again, it depends on being able to recognize the right kind of cells in the body. And now you're almost doing an inverse where you're trying to tune down the immune response that's happening in the body, targeting the right kind of cells to help dampen that immune response. In this case, you're probably targeting cells that are very hyperactivated in autoimmunity. How do we kill those and control the populations to bring down and dampen that response? It's a unique challenge. One would say the market size is actually much, much, much larger for autoimmune diseases than for cancer. So there's a lot of Great opportunity to help a lot of people who are suffering from autoimmune diseases as well.
D
Is there anything on the horizon for CAR T therapy that we didn't cover, that you're really excited about and that folks should keep skimming headlines for and then reading the full article after?
C
I think there's a lot of great scientific research happening. I'm particularly excited about, say, synthetic biology applications. We've supported projects where we're getting more complicated in the synthetic circuits one can build inside T cells. There's now almost three levels of logic where you can say, hey, CAR T cell only get activated if you are, say, in the brain. Don't get activated anywhere else in the body. If you are in the brain and you recognize a cell that expresses A and B or A or B, then kill. So it's almost like programming. So I can clearly tell, I'm an engineer, done a lot of coding. You could build this level of circuitry inside a T cell. And the reality is some of our solid tumors are going to be very, very challenging to treat. So we would need a higher level of complexity to sort of target those kind of tumors, for example. So I'm very curious and very excited to see how this field progresses where we start building more complicated circuitry inside the nucleus of these immune cells. And where it goes from there, there'll be new engineering challenges. How do you deliver such large circuit payloads inside immune cells? But I think these are all solvable problems, and it'll really open up the space to think of new solutions for even new diseases.
D
Once we do that, it's very cool to think about this organic cell, this actual biological thing, microscopic thing that you can now input specific instructions and have it do your dirty work, so to speak, and in this case, save lives, hopefully.
C
It's like thinking of a living drug that's a computer, and you can program billions of these tiny computers to put inside your body and orchestrate a response. It's one of my favorite things. My PhD supervisor, Peter Zamster, he used to love talking about swarms, too. Say starlings are all of these birds that move together in a cohesive manner. Now you're thinking of these billions of living drugs, cells that are programmable computers working in cohesion inside your body. Pretty exciting space, I think.
D
Almost sounds scary, but in a very cool, very, very inspiring way.
C
Step one is safety. So nothing we do, we first prove safety inside patients. So that'll always be the first step.
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Yeah.
D
That is so cool. Thank you so much, Shreya, for joining us and teaching us all about how cool T cells and car T therapies are.
C
My pleasure. So nice to speak with you and thank you for having me again. Yes, likewise.
D
Dr. Shreya Shukla is a biomedical engineer and expert in T cell therapies.
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Pigeons get a lot of flack. They're called rats of the sky, and they poop everywhere, Making them the subject of endless complaints by city dwellers. But let's not forget that pigeons are sophisticated creatures with incredible navigational abilities. In fact, a research team thinks they may have uncovered A key mechanism to pigeons homing abilities. They discovered certain immune cells in the bird's liver that seems to be necessary for sensing earth's magnetic field and guiding the pigeons home. Now, we've known for a long time that certain animals use magnetoreception As a sort of built in gps. Sea turtles, salmon, and a bunch of birds. It seems to be some combination of biological mechanisms that allow them to wayfind across massive distances. But scientists aren't exactly sure which ones. Some previous theories include magnetic fields Interacting with things like the inner ear, Magnetite crystals embedded in their tissues, or proteins in their retina. A research team discovered that immune cells in the spleens of mice and humans Contained tiny super paramagnetic particles. Unlike familiar refrigerator magnets, these particles only align To a magnetic field when one is present. So the team, led by scientists from the university of bonn and the Max planck institute of animal behavior, Began thinking, what if the same thing is going on in pigeons and this is how they navigate? So off to the lab they went. They checked all sorts of pigeon tissues to see whether any of them were magnetic, and it was their liver that had the strongest signal. When they looked at the liver tissue with an electron microscope, they saw that many of these immune cells, called macrophages, Were cozied up with nerve fibers. In mammals and birds, Macrophages can communicate with nerve fibers which connect up to the brain. It made sense, in theory, that those super paramagnetic particles Would be able to connect with those neurons Acting like an internal compass. The theory was sound, so it came time to test it. The researchers trained 34 homing pigeons to fly a 19 kilometer route, then gave around half of their flying trainees A drug that depleted their macrophages. Pigeons can also use the position of the sun to orient themselves during the day. So the team waited for a day that was completely overcast to release the pigeons with trackers attached. All the birds that lost their macrophages Became completely disoriented and only flew home Once the skies had cleared. The birds that got placebo injections, though, they flew straight home to make sure it wasn't a fluke or that the drug just confused the pigeons entirely. They tried the experiment again on a sunny day and then they found all the pigeons flew home with no problem. How exactly the macrophages pass magnetic information to the neurons is still up in the air. So that's the next step in the research. Homing pigeons have been used to deliver messages for thousands of years, flying home with tiny tubes strapped to their legs to deliver urgent news across battlefields and oceans. Maybe a little more knowledge about their fascinating internal compass will make sure they get the respect they deserve for Warner Bros. Discovery Curiosity Weekly is produced by the team at Wheelhouse DNA. The senior producer and editorial correspondent is Teresa Carey. Our producer is Chiara Noni, our audio engineer is Nick Karisimi, our fact checker is Lauren Coella and head of Production for Wheelhouse DNA is Cassie Berman. And I'm Dr. Samantha Yueen. Thanks for listening,
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Podcast by Discovery | Host: Dr. Samantha Yammine
Guest: Dr. Shreya Shukla (Biomedical Engineer, T cell therapy entrepreneur)
Date: July 15, 2026
This episode dives deep into two hot topics in biomedical science: the promise and hype around peptides in wellness, and a detailed exploration of CAR T cell therapy—one of the most groundbreaking advancements in cancer treatment. Host Dr. Samantha Yammine (“Sam”) interviews Dr. Shreya Shukla, an engineer and expert in cell-based therapies, to demystify how the body can be “programmed” at the cellular level to recognize and attack diseases like cancer and (in future) autoimmune disorders. The hosts also probe the limits and risks of current fads—particularly concerning unregulated peptides—before celebrating the complexity and hope offered by new treatments.
"Despite their popularity and what wellness influencers are saying on TikTok, the experts agree—the potential benefit of injecting yourself with unregulated chemical compounds is not worth the potential and known risks." (D, 05:37)
"Maybe this cancer cell is wearing a full blown jacket... versus some cancer cells are only wearing tiny gloves." (C, 13:59)
"There may be only one T cell that recognizes a particular... infection. It will quietly live in your lymph nodes... Then suddenly... it starts multiplying and growing and becomes a full blown army..." (C, 14:46)
"It's a very, very fun space right now... The pros are you don't have to ex vivo or engineer cells outside the body, which can be a very expensive process..." (C, 21:21)
“It's like thinking of a living drug that's a computer, and you can program billions of these tiny computers to put inside your body and orchestrate a response... Pretty exciting space.” (C, 26:41)
“Step one is safety. So nothing we do, we first prove safety inside patients. So that'll always be the first step.” (C, 27:28)
“Maybe a little more knowledge about their fascinating internal compass will make sure they get the respect they deserve.” (D, 33:55)
On Peptide Hype and Risks:
“Nature News reported that Google searches for peptides rose from 1.3 million per month in 2024 to around 8 million per month in 2026... the issue here is a lack of data. Unregulated peptides being sold online often haven't been tested in humans, and they can be manufactured in labs with zero oversight.” (D, 01:24)
On T Cells as Soldiers:
“They are the soldiers of the body… orchestrating an immune response.” (C, 14:46)
On Costs and Innovations:
"The cost per dose is very, very high. You're talking about $350,000 to half a million. In some cases." (C, 21:21)
On Programming Cells:
"You could build this level of circuitry inside a T cell... I'm an engineer… You can program billions of these tiny computers to put inside your body..." (C, 26:41)
| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|-------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:08 | Debunking peptide wellness claims; regulatory issues | | 07:45 | Introduction to CAR T cell therapy | | 08:48 | What are CAR T cells? | | 10:08 | Cancers treated by CAR T | | 11:11 | Challenges in solid tumors | | 14:46 | Why T cells are unique and powerful | | 17:59 | How a CAR T is made—step by step | | 21:21 | Cost, in vivo innovations, manufacturing changes | | 22:59 | CAR T beyond cancer: autoimmunity trials | | 24:36 | The future: complex programming, safety, “living computers” | | 30:27 | How homing pigeons really navigate—a detour |
This episode demystifies the complexity and excitement around programming the human immune system—from the cautionary tale of wellness peptide fads to the hopeful engineering of super-smart T cells. Dr. Shreya Shukla draws vivid metaphors (soldiers, coats, gloves, living computers) to describe both the promise and the ever-present challenge of safely harnessing biology. As Dr. Yammine sums up, these advances, while “almost scary,” are also deeply inspiring and hint at a future where programmable biology profoundly impacts human health.
For further reading:
Produced by Warner Bros. Discovery, Wheelhouse DNA team.