MIB: Dr. Charles Strom on antibodies and early cancer detection

This week, we spoke with Dr. Charles Strom, former medical director for genetic testing at Quest Diagnostics. He has spent the last 30 years in the rapidly changing field of genetic testing, and has made groundbreaking work in pre-implantation genetics while at the Institute of Reproductive Genetics, and has served as a faculty member at the University of Chicago, where he also earned his living. Doctorate and medical degree. Currently, he is the CEO and co-founder of Liquid Diagnostics, which uses new technology to analyze ultra-short DNA fragments in saliva and blood.

We discuss how the latest medical technology can detect specific disease markers in saliva antibodies – a much less invasive procedure than biopsy or blood draw. There are also genetic markers for certain types of cancer, which are otherwise difficult to detect. For example, 80% of lung cancers are detected when they are in 3 or 4 phases. At that stage, it is too late to successfully treat the disease and the results are always bad. If this (or other) cancer is detected earlier in at-risk patients, the prognosis improves dramatically.

He explained how during the epidemic, Liquid Diagnosis added covid-antibodies to their test kits. Instead of simply determining whether a patient is positive or negative for covid, they may determine quantitative antibody levels. This makes it a significant tool for determining how much an individual or an entire city or region is at risk. High levels of antibodies indicate that a city may tolerate a new outbreak, while low levels indicate potential high levels of infection, hospitalization and mortality.

Dr. Stream notes that in the case of public health, everyone is treated the same. But it turns out that is not the case. If you can determine your antibody level, you can decide if you need a second or third booster. People with high levels of Covid antibodies should feel free to do what they were doing pre-Covid and suspend another booster until the cold and flu season. Those with low antibodies should get a booster immediately.

Here is a list of his favorite books; A transcript of our conversation is available here Monday.

You can stream and download our entire conversation, including podcast extras on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Google, Bloomberg and Acast. All our previous podcasts on your favorite pod host can be found here.

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business with Jonathan Miller next week to discuss real estate, home sales, rent and whether cities are dead. Miller is the CEO and co-founder of Miller Samuel, whose real estate data and analytics have become the norm for the residential real estate appraisal and brokerage industries.