From Our Neurons to Yours

Today we’re going to be talking about a recent study that is rewriting neuroscience textbooks, potentially changing our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease, our brain’s immune system, and the potential for immunotherapy for the brain.
Today’s guest is Julia Belk, lead author of a new study that discovered that as we age, immune cells from the blood somehow cross the supposedly impenetrable blood–brain barrier, and replace the brain’s native immune cells, the microglia. The findings help us understand growing links between the aging immune system and Alzheimer’s disease and why certain blood mutations – ones traditionally linked to cancer – might actually protect against neurodegeneration.
Julia is an HHMI Hannah Gray postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Sidd Jaiswal at Stanford Medicine. Their research was supported by the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Wu Tsai Neuro.
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Jaiswal Lab at Stanford Medicine
Mutant microglia and resilience to Alzheimer’s disease
Blood Cells Replenish Microglia in the Brain as People Age (The Scientist, 2026)
Peripheral Blood Cells Replenish Aging Human Microglia (Neuroscience News, 2026)
Aging brains welcome reinforcements from outside immune cells (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2026)
Blood Cells Mutated in Old Age Protect Against Alzheimer’s Disease (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2023)
Why Our Memory Slips After Age 50 (Ground Truths, a Substack from Eric Topol, 2026
Somatic mutations reveal the ontogeny of microglia in human ageing (Nature, 2026)
Clonal hematopoiesis is associated with protection from Alzheimer’s disease (Nature Medicine, 2023) 
Send us a text!
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu
Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Today on the show we're doing something a little different.
Quite different, actually. Nine seasons in, listeners might wonder: Why do we make this show? How do we prepare for it? What do we hope you get out of it? What even is the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute? 
The idea has been brewing for a while, and this time we're doing it: From Our Neurons To Yours is taking you behind the scenes of From Our Neurons To Yours. Producer Michael Osborne joins host Nicholas Weiler to talk about where the show came from, how we get ready to bring you to the frontiers of neuroscience, and yes, what Wu Tsai Neuro is all about.

Send us a text!
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu
Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Today on the show, we explore the complex biology underlying a seemingly straightforward question: How do our brains stay healthy – or not – as we age?
There seems to be a constant flow of new secrets to healthy brain aging – inflammation, estrogen levels, how the brain clears out its waste. We've talked about many of these explanations on the show, and it can be easy to think that whatever the latest one is, that's the one. At least until the next one comes along.
In reality, each of those things is probably part of a larger complex system that guides brain aging. But if that's the case, how do the parts fit together, and how do scientists figure out interventions that could slow or prevent neurodegeneration?  
That's a tricky challenge to be sure, but it's that challenge we're going to dive into with today's guest, neurobiologist Tom Clandinin. 
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Clandinin Lab
Qiu Lab
Allen Lab
Big Ideas in Neuroscience tackle brain science of everyday life and more (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2026)
Convergence of biological and artificial networks (Current Biology, 2021)
Coupling of activity, metabolism and behaviour across the Drosophila brain (Nature, 2021)
Drosophila Connectomics: Mapping the Larval Eye’s Mind (Current Biology, 2017)
Flies and humans share a motion estimation strategy that exploits natural scene statistics (Nature Neuroscience, 2014)
Send us a text!
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu
Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Today on the show, we bring you a conversation with Carolyn Bertozzi, the Baker Family Director of Sarafan ChEM-H and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences. 
Bertozzi is a Nobel Laureate, a MacArthur Fellow, and an all around cool person – although it didn't come up in the conversation, she used to play in a band with Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello.
Although Bertozzi wouldn’t call herself a neuroscientist — she’s a chemist at heart – her work is having a big impact on neuroscience. Today, she focuses on the sugar molecules that stud the outer surfaces of our cells. It turns out that these molecules are incredibly important for how cells communicate with each other. But understanding these molecules is so complex and challenging that Bertozzi had to invent a new branch of chemistry in order to study them. In this episode, we'll hear how this research is opening doors not only within neuroscience but across biology and drug development as well.
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The Bertozzi Lab
‘To advance science, I think it’s important to blur the boundaries between the disciplines’ (Stanford Report, 2026)
Changes in brain’s ‘sugar shield’ could be key to understanding effects of aging (Stanford Report, 2025)
Life is sweet (Stanford Magazine, 2022)
Stanford’s Carolyn Bertozzi wins Nobel in chemistry (Stanford Report, 2022)
Interview with Carolyn Bertozzi (Nobelprize.org, 2022)
Aging brains pile up damaged proteins (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2025)
Nobel Prize: How click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry are transforming the pharmaceutical and material industries (The Conversation, 2022)
Glycocalyx dysregulation impairs blood-brain barrier in ageing and disease (Nature, 2025)
Send us a text!
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu
Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Health influencers and scientists have both gone crazy for peptides.

The peptide health craze stems from a lot of online hype — centered on gray-market compounds that haven't been rigorously tested in humans and aren't regulated for safety or purity. But among scientists, there is a genuine "revolution" underway — spurred by technological developments revealing an order of magnitude more peptides in our bodies than we ever realized, and by the unexpected and unparalleled success of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic.

To learn more about what’s driving this excitement – and how much of the peptide hype is really worth your attention – we spoke with Stanford biochemist Jonathan Long, an associate professor of pathology at Stanford Medicine, an affiliate of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, and an Institute Scholar of Stanford Sarafan ChEM-H.

Editor's Note: After we went to press, Colorado biotech Enveda announced promising but early Phase 1 safety results for ENV-308, an oral drug engineered to mimic Lac-Phe — the "exercise in a pill" molecule Long's lab first characterized in 2022. The trial didn't test actual weight-loss or fitness effects, so the real thing isn't here yet — but Long, a scientific advisor to Enveda, calls it "an extremely exciting potential scientific breakthrough." Read more
Learn more
Long Lab of Chemical Physiology
An ‘Exercise Pill’ Just Cleared Its First Human Test (Gizmodo, 2026)
A pill that mimics exercise? Early results on drug designed to maintain both weight loss and muscle mass (STAT, 2026)
Peptides are everywhere. Here’s what you need to know. (MIT Technology Review, 2026)
Influencers are promoting peptides for better health. What does the science say? (NPR, 2026)
What doctors want patients to know about injectable peptides (American Medical Association, 2026)
Why Are People Injecting Themselves with Peptides? (The New Yorker, 2026)
Peptides are buzzing: But what does the science say? (Stanford Medicine, 2026)
Study of pythons’ extreme diet reveals new hunger-curbing molecule (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2026)
Unlocking the secrets of ketosis (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2024)
Weight loss caused by common diabetes drug tied to "anti-hunger" molecule in study (Stanford Medicine, 2024)
Q&A: Unlocking the secrets of taurine in obesity control (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2024)
Exercise and the brain (From Our Neurons to Yours, 2023)
Lac-Phe mediates the effects metformin on food intake and body weight (Nature Metabolism, 2024)
Send us a text!
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu
Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.