In this episode of Plugged in to Public Health, we sit down with James Byrne, assistant professor of radiation oncology and biomedical engineering at the University of Iowa, to explore how interdisciplinary science is reshaping cancer care. Dr. Byrne shares his path through MD-PhD training and explains how his work bridges medicine, engineering, and biology to address some of the biggest challenges in oncology. From oxygen-delivering foams inspired by everyday tools to radiation-protective proteins borrowed from extremophile organisms, this conversation highlights how surprisingly simple concepts can lead to powerful clinical innovations.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the student hosts, guests, and contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the University of Iowa or the College of Public Health.

Lauren Lavin:

Hello everybody, and welcome back to Plugged in to Public Health. Today’s episode is all about what happens when medicine, engineering, and curiosity collide. We are joined by Dr. James Byrne, an assistant professor of radiation oncology and biomedical engineering at the University of Iowa. Dr. Byrne is an MD-PhD, whose work sits at the intersection of cancer treatment, innovation, and translational research, meaning research that actually makes it from the lab bench to real patients. In this episode, we talk about what it’s really like to turn an idea into a therapy, from oxygen foams inspired by coffee shop tools, to radiation-protected proteins borrowed from some of the toughest organisms on earth. Dr. Byrne walks us through how simple ideas can sometimes solve incredibly complex problems. We also dig into how cancer treatments are evolving beyond just curing disease, toward protecting quality of life long after treatment ends.

My name is Lauren Lavin and I’m joined by the public … I’m Lauren Lavin, and if it’s your first time with us, welcome. We’re a student-run podcast that explores major issues in public health and why they matter both inside and outside the field. So let’s get plugged in to public health. Well, thank you, Dr. Byrne, for being on the podcast today. Could you start by introducing yourself and share what drew you to cancer research, specifically radiation oncology?

James Byrne:

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I am James Byrne. I’m a assistant professor in radiation oncology and biomedical engineering. My training was unique in that I did an MD and a PhD really focused on cancer research and new cancer therapies. And so I was drawn, really, to the field knowing that there was a dire need, and there still is a dire need, really it hasn’t changed in … Or the need has not changed within the past 20 years ever since I was an undergraduate researcher over at the University of Texas at Austin. And so there’s still a huge need for research, especially within cancer, and new innovations that can potentially move the needle on how we treat our patients.

Lauren Lavin:

I’m a PhD student and that’s hard, and I know that med school is hard. I literally can’t imagine voluntarily signing up for both. Did you know that you were going to do both at the outset?

James Byrne:

No. Initially, right at the end of undergrad, I knew I loved research, wanted to do research and cancer research, and I started off in my PhD program. And within the first year, first six months, I decided that I wanted to change and transition in to do MD-PhD. So I took the MCAT, applied during my first year, and then got into it my second year. So I did an unusual MD-PhD, where I did two years of my PhD first and then two years of med school, two years of PhD and then two years of med school.

Lauren Lavin:

So it was a total of eight years?

James Byrne:

Eight years.

Lauren Lavin:

Oh my gosh. What do you think that that combination of degrees brings to the table?

James Byrne:

It allows for the ability to translate research well, and understand what the problems are on the medicine side to be able to address those problems and to investigate those problems. And so you’ll see the full gamut of folks with MD-PhDs that do just basic science research, to the full translational scale and taking things directly into patients that they’ve discovered or that others have discovered. And they have that unique ability to translate and ask the questions, the appropriate questions really, for those patients and how best to translate these things. There’s a huge spectrum of what MD-PhDs do in general, not just in medicine but beyond, in consulting, in innovation, in tech. And so they fill this unique translational niche, where they’re able to really span the gamut on not just investigation, but also clinical applicability.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah, I can really see how it takes it from bench to patient and you serve that bridge.

James Byrne:

Absolutely.

Lauren Lavin:

After you did your schooling, then what does the post-grad schooling look like when you’re an MD-PhD?

James Byrne:

Absolutely. For myself, I opted to do radiation oncology, and radiation oncology requires a transitional year almost, one where you can do almost anything. People will do really a blanket transitional year that some hospitals will offer. I did a year of internal medicine at UNC where I did my MD-PhD, and then I went on to the Harvard Radiation Oncology Program. So I did an additional four years of training specifically radiation oncology. As a part of this, I did a heavy research area of rotation where I ended up doing two years through what’s called the Holman Pathway. It’s essentially a postdoc and did my postdoc at MIT.

Lauren Lavin:

Wow. You’ve just expanded the gamut in some pretty impressive institutions, but somehow you ended up here in Iowa.

James Byrne:

Absolutely.

Lauren Lavin:

So how did you end up in Iowa?

James Byrne:

My wife, family. She’s from Galesburg, Illinois, and her parents live in Iowa City. And so it was the perfect setting for us to be able to launch our careers. My wife’s a medical oncologist and so we are both within oncology, and this was really the perfect setting to allow me to pursue my passion of research and clinical work, and then her passion of clinical work.

Lauren Lavin:

I bet your dinner table discussions are super fun.

James Byrne:

Fun to some and probably less fun to others. Yeah, absolutely.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah, absolutely over my head. But can you distill down what specifically your research is and what you look at?

James Byrne:

Absolutely. We focus on translational engineering. We are interested in using very simple techniques, simple therapies to address major problems within cancer, and then take them forward into patients. And so for example, if you’ve ever gone to Starbucks, or in Iowa City we have Java House, if you look at the back of each of those coffee shops, you’ll see that they have these whipping siphons that they use to create foam on the top of hot chocolates or frappuccinos. We’ve reverse-engineered the system to accept any gas. So we put oxygen in these systems and created oxygen foams. Well, there’s a major problem we know within many types of cancer that they can have very low oxygen levels. And so in creating these oxygen foams, we can inject these into tumors to reoxygenate these tumors and make them more susceptible to radiation, to chemotherapy, and even immunotherapy. And so the first project that we were working on in lab is now going into patients, and so we’re submitting an investigational new drug application here soon so that we can start up that clinical trial within the next, hopefully few months.

Lauren Lavin:

And what’s the process look like from getting it in a lab to getting it into a patient? How long does that process take, and what are all the barriers to that?

James Byrne:

Goodness. Yeah, in general it takes a really long time. There’s so much that needs to be vetted in terms of safety, making sure that something is safe. You have to show equal parts safety and efficacy. And so in terms of this project, this project has been going on for the past three years or so, so we’ve been very, very fortunate to be able to translate this and to take this pretty quickly. We did so through a number of unique mechanisms of using very safe materials that the FDA considers as safe and recognizes as safe, and ones that are used in injectables. And then using just the simple concept of oxygen and oxygenating these systems, that allowed us to be able to translate things fairly quickly. But generally, it takes a long time. If you discover and develop a new drug, it can take a decade or more to be able to really get something established from the benchtop to the bedside.

Lauren Lavin:

How does one get a foam into an injection, into the body?

James Byrne:

It’s unique. Instead of using the whipping siphons, what you’d find at Starbucks, we are using a syringe mixing method to be able to create the foam, and then do so sterilely and then inject it directly into a tumor.

Lauren Lavin:

Are there certain people who you use this type of treatment on particularly?

James Byrne:

Absolutely. The initial focus is on sarcoma, our patients with sarcomas, ones that we know have low oxygen levels. And it makes sense too. 60% of patients with sarcomas will have what are called extremity sarcomas, so these large bulky tumors in the arms or legs. And they’re easily injected with various substances, including these oxygen foams.

Lauren Lavin:

And then do you just work on one project at a time?

James Byrne:

No. We have many, many different projects, and I know I’m extremely fortunate in terms of funding from the NIH foundations, who really support the work and allow us to really grow the team to be able to do a lot of different types of projects in the lab. And so we have a number of great products going on in terms of not just cancer therapy, but also a huge problem that we know in oncology of, as we have more cancer survivors and have more patients that are cured of their cancer, we’re leaving them with these side effects. And some can be terrible side effects, chronic side effects that last the entirety of their lives and affect the entirety of their life completely. So they are not as functional as they were. The quality of their life is not as high as it once was. And so we have projects that are ongoing where we are trying to prevent those side effects from occurring, so that we can improve the overall quality of life of a patient after they’re cured.

Lauren Lavin:

It’s a really interesting concept because I hadn’t really ever thought about that. The goal is to cure an individual of cancer, but then now that we’re doing that, which is obviously a great problem, they’re kind of stuck with, yeah, like you said, all of those side effects. We know chemo’s nasty and radiation is, and so then, I guess, what do you do for them afterwards?

And your work looks at what would be considered extraordinary organisms as well, correct?

James Byrne:

That’s right, extremophilic organisms.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay, extremophilic. What are examples of those organisms?

James Byrne:

So tardigrades are the prime example, and many people have seen them out in the news recently. They’re extraordinary micro animals. You’ll find them in any fresh waterway across the world.

Lauren Lavin:

Even in Iowa?

James Byrne:

Even in Iowa. And NASA has put them out in space and then brought them back and found that they can survive. There were others, yeti crabs, there are a number of bacteria. There are these unique organisms that for some reason have evolved so that they can tolerate any condition that you throw at them. And so tardigrades, as an example, not just as NASA put them out in space, but we can provide a huge amount of radiation, doses of radiation that we as people can’t tolerate, even our tissues can’t tolerate. But these organisms can tolerate without any issue. They go on to survive. We’re looking into why that is, trying to dive down and understand not just why that is, but can we apply this to protecting our patients and protecting the normal tissues that our patients we know will have damage as a result of the treatment itself?

And so the tardigrade, as a prime example, we identified that there was a protein that they produce that protects the foundational parts of their cells called DNA, and it acts as a shield. So it protects that DNA, those fundamental parts, so that the cells can go on living normal, happy lives and go on to survive. And so what we ended up doing is really taking the coding sequence for that protein and then delivering it into the tissues where we wanted to protect, and we found that we could protect them to a large, more significant amount in terms of keeping them surviving and making sure that the tissues were very functional afterwards. And so it was pretty cool to see that we had this protection, a radiation protection effect within those tissues. And now we’re investigating a lot of other areas that could potentially provide a lot of benefit to, especially cancer patients that undergo radiation and chemo.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s fascinating. Did you discover this while you were here at Iowa?

James Byrne:

The protein itself and the sequence for this were discovered by a team out in Japan, and then we first started working on this when I was a postdoc over at MIT, and then carried this forward to completion over here at the University of Iowa.

Lauren Lavin:

And then is that something that you license to companies to use?

James Byrne:

No, so that’s all public use and public knowledge in terms of that protein, so we have not licensed anything or been able to develop a intellectual property or a provisional patent around that.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay. Well, this kind of leads me, because you spoke a little bit about the NIH funding, but you recently were awarded the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. How does that support this work and just your broader research agenda?

James Byrne:

It’s huge. It’s huge in that it allows us the flexibility to really dive down and investigate within this area and this whole concept. It allows us to have multiple team members really work and focus in on this, so that we can dive down and hopefully find something that is very much relevant and applicable to patients. But without it, it would be hard to. We wouldn’t have the support to be able to do so. I’m so gracious to the NIH for this award. And it’s, I think hugely important in terms of not just my career and the lab itself and the function of the lab, but then also really hopefully impactful in terms of the science that we’re going to be doing as a result of this.

Lauren Lavin:

I guess I’m going to have you backtrack. What does the award entail?

James Byrne:

So the award is a … It’s a $300,000 per year grant over five years that really focuses on the use of these extremophilic proteins or these proteins that can protect tissues and investigate not just the tardigrade specific protein, but then also a lot of other proteins that could provide more benefit and are not necessarily foreign to our own bodies. Because if you put something foreign into the body, if you think of like a parasitic infection or an implant or something that embeds in the skin, the body tries to get rid of it and it tries to get to fight it so that it could keep it away. And so the same thing would happen with this protein that’s from a foreign organism, but if we can use proteins that our body produces naturally, then it won’t fight that and we would actually be able to reduce any immune response that’s as a result.

Lauren Lavin:

Are there many of these awards handed out every year?

James Byrne:

There are about, I think 32 to 36 awards given out nationally.

Lauren Lavin:

Wow. So that makes you a pretty elite cohort. Do you ever get to interact with any of the other innovators?

James Byrne:

We do. There is an annual New Innovators summit that happens over at the NIH around DC. We did not meet this past year as a function of the change in administration. They were still trying to identify when they would want to have that meeting. So I expect that meeting is going to be in May of this next year over in Bethesda.

Lauren Lavin:

Did you ever imagine yourself on a trajectory where you would be an innovator in creating these novel techniques and applications?

James Byrne:

No, but I am so lucky. I love the work that I do. I love the ability to innovate and to create new things. I think that really drives me in terms of trying to help patients, and I find that hopefully the discoveries that we make could potentially even influence more patients than the patients that I treat in the clinic. And so my hope is that there’s broad-spanning influence and effect of the work that we do. But yeah, I love it. I wouldn’t want to do anything else.

Lauren Lavin:

Could you speak a little bit to the process of creating intellectual property and what that has looked like for you, and what that means?

James Byrne:

Absolutely. It’s unique and it’s a process that I wasn’t familiar with until I started in graduate school.

Lauren Lavin:

I can’t imagine most people are, so yeah.

James Byrne:

It’s easier than it sounds on paper. I’ll start off saying that. The whole idea of intellectual property is really to try and protect an idea, a process, a method, a technology, so that it could move forward and not be swooped in or stolen by someone else so that the idea itself could grow. The initial process of getting intellectual property or filing provisional patents and others is to put together a disclosure. It’s a form basically of an understanding of what the technology is, or the process or method is that you have invented. In addition, if there were other team members or key team members that have contributed intellectually to the idea or project, they would be considered inventors. Here at the University of Iowa, we end up filing this disclosure with our University of Iowa Research Foundation, that the team there involves a legal team, an external patent legal team, to really vet out the idea to form the claims around what the technology is so that they can protect it and file what’s called a provisional patent.

This provisional patent itself gives you coverage for a year before filing a full patent or international patent. And so you have 12 months to be able to vet the idea even further or you could immediately convert it to a full patent or international patent. And I say full patent being a US patent or an international patent, really coverage throughout the entire world. And so in terms of the cost, and one of the key things is that these are costly things, filing a provisional patent costs somewhere on the order of probably $2,000 to $5,000, whereas a full patent can cost thousands and thousands of dollars depending upon how broadly … What countries you’re going to be filing this international patent in and around, and so where you want to get this protection. But once that’s filed, then it goes through the patent offices and is evaluated by the patent officers to see if the claims themselves have been previously covered or if they’re completely newer and novel and separate. And then after that, they’ll award. And sometimes it takes years to get a full patent awarded, and so it just takes time.

Lauren Lavin:

So in that interim, like let’s say you do the provisional patent and you’ve got 12 months, but it takes years to get your full patent, what happens in that interim? Are you still protected?

James Byrne:

So yep, you’re still protected. Once you file the conversion to a full US patent or an international patent, that whole time is covered. But the patent life itself is encountered in this.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

James Byrne:

And so you’re covered within that timeframe.

Lauren Lavin:

And how long is a patent life?

James Byrne:

It depends. Generally about 20 years, depending upon what it is.

Lauren Lavin:

How does an inventor decide between a US patent or an international, or do you do both?

James Byrne:

Generally you try to go for both, and I think that it comes down to who is funding the conversion, whether it’s funded in-house or it’s funded by a startup company, or even further, other companies that would want to license the technology. It depends on who’s going to be doing it.

Lauren Lavin:

And in your experience, did you have funding from Iowa or were you using startup funding?

James Byrne:

For some of the initial work, we’ve had startup funding from the University of Iowa, the Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center. We also had external funds through the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Department of Defense, in terms of when I first started here. And then ever since that we’ve grown.

Lauren Lavin:

I’m guessing that’s probably representative of a lot of people, where you have funding from different places to cover just that, all of the costs associated with it.

James Byrne:

With not necessarily the patents-

Lauren Lavin:

Oh, okay.

James Byrne:

… because the University of Iowa will-

Lauren Lavin:

Covers that.

James Byrne:

… generally cover that.

Lauren Lavin:

Got it. But this is for the research beyond that.

James Byrne:

Mm-hmm.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay. And how many patents do you hold?

James Byrne:

I’ve filed 10 or more. Not since I’ve just been here as well, but over the entire span of my research career.

Lauren Lavin:

So you kind of have a time limit, right? You’ve got 20 years to theoretically maximize the value. Is that something that drives you or does that time clock not really bother you?

James Byrne:

To this point, the time clock doesn’t really bother me. Ideally, we would maximize the time by filing the latest that we possibly could before a disclosure event, like a presentation or a manuscript getting accepted for publication. We would file it at that last point so that the patent life would be as long as we could possibly have it with the most amount of preliminary data set up.

Lauren Lavin:

And then just turning back to some of the actual research, can you explain the approach for delivering molecular tools via RNA inspired by the extremophiles, this is just getting down to that nitty-gritty, and how that helps to actually protect the tissues during radiation?

James Byrne:

Sure. In terms of what we’re actually delivering, we’re delivering what are called nucleic acids, and the nucleic acids are really the large, overwhelming concept of ones that we’re delivering. There’s different types of nucleic acid. There’s DNA and then there’s RNA and then there’s a lot of others. And so we’re delivering mRNA. This is a short, single-stranded system that is the information carrier for proteins. The body will use that coding sequence to create the protein of interest. And so we were using these very, very common molecules that we have in our body called lipids. Every cell in our body has a lipid on it. So we use lipids to create these particles that assemble with the … The lipids assemble with the RNA to create these particles, and we deliver these particles or nanoparticles through injection into the tissues.

The cells that we’re injecting in and around will take up those particles and then make the protein once the nucleic acid or the mRNA is within the cell. And so from there, they make those proteins. Those proteins are very unique and they go straight to the DNA, the nucleus itself, the heart of the cell or the brain of the cell. It’ll go directly into the cell or into the nucleus, protect and bind to the DNA so that it protects the DNA from radiation damage, because radiation can come in different forms. It causes damage in different ways.

Lauren Lavin:

You made me understand that, at least to the level that you described, and I am not a basic science girl. Have you guys tried this in human patients?

James Byrne:

We have not, no. This is something we would love to be able to try this. I think we need to find and generate forms that are much more patient friendly. So to directly inject into the cheek of a person or the rectum of a person who’s undergoing radiation and to do on a daily basis or every so often would be challenging and I think could be harmful, and so we are investigating new ways to get this into the tissues of interest.

Lauren Lavin:

What are the models that you used before you get to humans?

James Byrne:

We’ve used small animal models. We’ve used mostly mice, and some rats.

Lauren Lavin:

And then do you go straight from mice to humans or is there a stop in between?

James Byrne:

There’s generally a stop in between where we would do safety testing within a larger animal species, like a pig or sheep or others.

Lauren Lavin:

And do you do that all here at the University of Iowa?

James Byrne:

We can. We have yet to do that though.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

James Byrne:

Yeah.

Lauren Lavin:

And then also going back to the foams, so they’re gas-entrapping foams?

James Byrne:

Gas-entrapping materials, yep.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay. And what is their use within the cancer space and where do you see that going?

James Byrne:

We have a number of unique and cool projects involving those, the first one being to address the really low oxygen levels that some tumors can have. And some tumors, I should say, are resistant to radiation or chemo because of those low oxygen levels. And if we can boost that, then we can have a much more profound effect. So that was the initial starting point. But we can deliver other drugs with this. We can combine drugs with oxygen, with injection into a tumor and cause really more effective treatments. We’ve looked at other gases outside of oxygen. Funny enough, carbon monoxide, as unique of a molecule as it is, people know it for its poison or its toxic properties.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah, I have a tester for it in my house.

James Byrne:

Yeah, so we all have these carbon monoxide detectors in our house that … Our body naturally produces carbon monoxide, I should say. It’s a breakdown product of, really blood of … The iron or the heme within blood itself is broken down into carbon monoxide and a different component, biliverdin. And so looking at carbon monoxide at low concentrations, it actually has these unique properties that can impact cells in different ways. Cancer cells, it can slow them down and slow their growth. In normal cells, it tends to protect normal cells and promote anti-inflammation, promote cell regeneration. And so we’re using that in a couple different ways, and we ended up finding that it has a role in cell function. As our body naturally recycles proteins and components of the cell, it impacts that and causes that to rev up even further. And so there are some very, I guess older drugs that people have tried in clinical trials in cancer patients and found to fail. These are drugs that block that process of recycling in cells.

And so they ended up at least concluding that these were not that effective in cancer. So we ended up testing carbon monoxide delivered via gas-entrapping materials combined with these drugs, and found that we had a much more effective strategy going forward. And so funny enough, and this is somewhat strange, but smokers, cigarette smokers have higher levels of carbon monoxide. It’s also a breakdown or a combustion product from cigarette smoking and tobacco smoking.

Lauren Lavin:

Just in their whole body?

James Byrne:

In their whole body.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

James Byrne:

And so we ended up doing, in our lab, a trial where we ended up sampling blood from smokers, active smokers, and non-smokers, and found that they had much higher carbon monoxide levels in their blood. What we ended up doing was, we ended up going back to the investigators that ran those trials and asked them, “Well, did you have any smokers on those trials that actively smoked while they were taking those drugs that stopped that cell recycling?” And they said, “Yeah, in fact we did.” And we went and looked at how those patients did and found that they actually had a nice, even more profound response than the majority of non-smokers that received these drugs. And so we ended up using that to push forward on a strategy where carbon monoxide itself could be beneficial, and found that this was helpful in small animal models that had cancer. And so this would be something that we could nicely translate to patients as well.

Lauren Lavin:

That is so interesting. How did you even think of that link?

James Byrne:

It was strange in the way that we looked. There had been one or two papers really demonstrating this impact on normal lung cells, and so we ended up projecting it forward and found that it, in fact, had bearing and was potentially impactful.

Lauren Lavin:

Do you ever go down rabbit holes like that and it doesn’t yield to anything?

James Byrne:

Oh, all the time.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

James Byrne:

All the time, yeah, so-

Lauren Lavin:

So it’s mot always a success story.

James Byrne:

You don’t win every time. No.

Lauren Lavin:

And then you are using that in humans at the moment?

James Byrne:

Not yet.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay. And when do you think that that would be something?

James Byrne:

Not sure. That could translate fairly quickly. I think it comes down to time, money, and so we-

Lauren Lavin:

It’s always those two things.

James Byrne:

Yep, yep. So hopefully here soon.

Lauren Lavin:

And throughout this whole conversation, I’m struck by probably how interdisciplinary some of this is. When you collaborate across engineering, oncology, biology, that’s no small feat, so how have interdisciplinary efforts shaped your lab’s progress, and how do you make some of those connections that are probably integral to progressing forward?

James Byrne:

Probably the most important thing is the team, the team that we have. We try to bring in people with different interests, with different skill sets, with different backgrounds and disciplines. Just as an example, on our team, Emily Witt is a marine biologist in background. She has a master’s in marine biology or equivalent. One of the main researchers that was focused on some of the initial projects was a cancer biologist. And so we pulled in folks from BME, folks from cancer biology, folks from various other disciplines to try to create this interdisciplinary approach. And it’s really at that interface that you find that there’s a richness of inventions and discoveries that can be made because people just haven’t put those two things together or put a couple of those areas together yet. And so I love working at that interface because there’s so much great stuff that can happen at that interface. Who knew that foam from whipping siphons that you find at Starbucks or Java House could be impactful or could be taking it into patients.

Lauren Lavin:

Right.

James Byrne:

And so it’s looking at these discoveries, looking at research in a slightly different lens to try and see if you can really push the boundary on what we’ve been able to do, and how we can really create new therapies that can help patients.

Lauren Lavin:

For students that are listening to the podcast and thinking about either a career after school or even getting involved in research while they are in school, how should they look at joining a team? What advice do you have?

James Byrne:

Yeah, so don’t hesitate to reach out to the people whose research that you find interesting and don’t let people telling you no … Or don’t get frustrated or upset with people saying no or not responding. In research, we find that there is a lot of failure, a lot of rejection, but you have to have some persistence. And so if someone doesn’t have space in their lab, that’s okay. There are other great labs that may do similar research. You can ask them, “Who else could you recommend that may have space?” and then reach out to them. But I would say just go for it. Try. That’s really the biggest barrier.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah. The worst that can happen is that they say no, and then you can just try again somewhere else.

James Byrne:

Exactly.

Lauren Lavin:

So as we close this up, what milestones or trials are next for your career? What are you working on right now that you can see going somewhere ahead?

James Byrne:

We have a number of, I think areas that we’re pushing into, all interdisciplinary, and so not just in cancer, but also in orthopedic applications, in dermatology or wound healing. I think there’s a lot of great areas that we can really address these major complex problems with simple solutions. And so we’ve been pushing forward on those areas. We are constantly applying for grants to be able to grow the team as well as explore different areas of science to create new therapies, and so that’s always ongoing. So that’s my hope, is to really translate a number of these into even more clinical trials that can help patients. And so the biggest way of doing that is funding and making sure that we fund the team so that we can do those things, make those things a reality.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah. I like how you framed it as simple solutions for complex problems. If people are interested in your work, where can they find you?

James Byrne:

They can always email me. We have a lab website that I think has my email address. If not, it’s on the UIHC website. And so they can reach me through that. They can swing by the lab anytime. We’re out in third floor of Murph. We have a fantastic team. I think we try to really help people grow their careers so that they can go and launch and do even more things that can help patients or help others.

Lauren Lavin:

And I don’t think I asked, how many people are on your team?

James Byrne:

We have about 15.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s pretty big.

James Byrne:

We’re lucky.

Lauren Lavin:

All the way from grad students to-

James Byrne:

From undergrads to-

Lauren Lavin:

Undergrads.

James Byrne:

… grad students to postdocs. Yep.

Lauren Lavin:

Incredible. Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to chat with me.

James Byrne:

Of course.

Lauren Lavin:

I really appreciate it, and I’m sure our audience did too.

James Byrne:

Yep. No, thank you so much for the invitation and I’m so grateful for being able to talk to y’all.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s it for our episode this week. A big thank you to Dr. James Byrne for joining us and for breaking down what cancer innovation looks like in practice. In this episode, we explored how interdisciplinary research fuels real-world impact, why translational science is so challenging, but so necessary, and how the future of cancer care is not just about survival, but about helping patients live better lives after treatment. We also heard practical advice for students interested in research, innovation, and building careers that cross traditional academic boundaries.

This episode was hosted and written by Lauren Lavin and produced and edited by Lauren Lavin. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your classmates, colleagues, or anyone interested in public health. It helps us more than you think. Have a suggestion for our team? You can reach us at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode was brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Until next time, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.