A compact guide to how your body works, powered by the world-class scientists of Virginia Tech’s Fralin Biomedical Research Institute. The Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC is one of the nation’s fastest-growing academic biomedical research enterprises and a destination for world-class researchers. The institute’s scientists focus on diseases that are the leading causes of death and suffering in the United States, including brain disorders, heart disease, and cancer.
Conventional wisdom tells us that, to be healthy, we should exercise and limit fatty foods. Exercise helps us lose weight, build muscle, strengthens our hearts and boosts how we take in and use oxygen for energy — one of the strongest predictors of health and longevity.
But people with high blood sugar often don’t enjoy those benefits from exercise, especially the ability to use oxygen efficiently.
For them, a new study (https://news.vt.edu/articles/2026/02/research_fralinbiomed_lessardketo.html?utm_campaign=fy26global&utm_source=bssp&utm_content=discoveries&utm_medium=podcast&utm_program=fbri) suggests the answer could be eating not less fat, but more.
Exercise medicine scientist Sarah Lessard (https://fbri.vtc.vt.edu/people-directory/primary-faculty/lessard.html) explains her new study that examines how the keto diet might help people with diabetes and high blood sugar in the latest episode of Big Science Small Pod.
“What we're really finding from this study and from our other studies is that diet and exercise aren't simply working in isolation,” she said. “There are a lot of combined effects. And so we can get the most benefits from exercise if we eat a healthy diet at the same time.”
13 Jan 2026
What Makes Seizures Start?
Not all cases of epilepsy are the same. Some people suffer a few seizures, begin taking one of 30 or more epilepsy medications available, and live a typical life.
But for about a half million U.S. children with treatment-resistant disease, it’s far worse. Their seizures keep coming, making them more likely to die young. They’re at greater risk for learning problems, social and emotional difficulties, and social isolation.
Many of these epilepsies are caused by genetic mutations. Matthew Weston (https://fbri.vtc.vt.edu/people-directory/primary-faculty/weston.html), a neuroscientist at Virginia Tech's Fralin Biomedical Research Institute (https://fbri.vtc.vt.edu/), leads a team working to identify them.
In the latest episode of Big Science Small Pod, Weston explains what happens in the brain during seizures and how his lab is researching their genetic roots to help develop new treatments for children.
“My goal,” Weston said, “is to understand this in a way that has an … effect on patient care, focused on making these kids’ lives better.”
13 Aug 2025
What Do You Do When Your Body Is Its Own Enemy?
Lining the vessels that carry blood and oxygen to your brain, there’s a protective filter than keeps bad stuff from getting out of the bloodstream and into the brain where it can do harm. It’s called the blood-brain barrier. But this feature becomes a problem when doctors need to get chemotherapy to a brain tumor. That protective barrier then stands between cancer and drugs that could treat it.
Physician-scientist Cheng-Chia “Fred” Wu (https://fbri.vtc.vt.edu/people-directory/primary-faculty/wu.html) of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute (https://fbri.vtc.vt.edu/) is investigating how to use sound to temporarily open that barrier to allow cancer drugs to reach brain tumors, like those caused by the highly lethal childhood cancer he treats, diffuse midline glioma.
“As a radiation doctor, I point beams to fight cancer. That's what we do. Point and shoot,” Wu said. “Ultrasound is very similar to radiation in many ways … and so when I first learned about it, I just felt that this was a technology that can really be transformative.”
3 Jul 2025
How Does a Brain Even Happen?
Neurobiologist Meike van der Heijden discusses how the cerebellum's development and function inform our understanding of movement disorders like dystonia and tremors, in this interview.
4 Mar 2025
What If Sound Could Heal?
Sound has been harnessed for uses from medical imaging to SONAR. Now, scientists are exploring how ultrasound can be focused and used to treat conditions as varied as chronic pain, addiction, and cancer. Wynn Legon (https://fbri.vtc.vt.edu/people-directory/primary-faculty/legon.html) explains the evolution of focused ultrasound and how his lab is contributing to the growing list of whats the technology can benefit our health.
Wynn Legon is an assistant professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC (https://fbri.vtc.vt.edu/) in Roanoke. His lab studies the use of low-intensity focused ultrasound (LIFU). LIFU is an emerging form of noninvasive neuromodulation that uses mechanical energy to affect neuronal activity. The technology combines high spatial resolution with deep focal lengths providing unprecedented non-invasive access to the human brain. The enormous potential of low-intensity focused ultrasound stems from the ability to focus it through the intact skull to a millimeter-sized focal spot virtually anywhere in the brain. This makes it a powerful alternative to both invasive neurosurgical procedures and other non-invasive brain stimulation techniques.
25 Feb 2025
Why Don’t I Slosh When I Walk?
Human beings are mostly water, and about a fifth of that water is interstitial fluid, flowing in the spaces between our cells. Jenny Munson (https://fbri.vtc.vt.edu/people-directory/primary-faculty/munson.html), a world leader in the study of interstitial fluid flow, explains how fluid flow changes in diseases like brain cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, and how that understanding is being used to improve treatments of those conditions and others.
Munson is a professor and director of Fralin Biomedical Research Institute's (https://fbri.vtc.vt.edu/) Cancer Research Center in Roanoke, Virginia. Part of her lab’s research focuses on brain cancer, and how fluid flow increases between cells within the tissue at the edge of the tumor where cancer cells mix with neighboring brain cells and evade typical therapies. Munson and her team believe fluid flow can alter how a tumor responds to drug therapies. The lab is also translating many of its methods and hypotheses to understand the role of fluid flow in immunity, aging, and women's health.
18 Feb 2025
What Makes a Heart Stop?
Your heart will beat billions of times, with incredible reliability, if you live a typical lifespan. But a handful of abnormal beats could be fatal. Steve Poelzing (https://fbri.vtc.vt.edu/people-directory/primary-faculty/poelzing.html), a groundbreaking cardiovascular scientist, divulges the complex mechanism behind a single heartbeat, how it can go awry, and what his research is discovering about identifying conditions that can disrupt healthy heart rhythms in order to head off fatal arrythmias.
Dr. Poelzing is a professor and associate director of faculty affairs at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute (https://fbri.vtc.vt.edu/). He studies the processes of electrical conductivity between heart muscle cells, the proteins that connect them, and how mutations are linked to sudden cardiac death. He also studies diseases such as heart failure, ischemia, and diabetes. Poelzing's research has demonstrated that the spread of electricity across the heart, which makes it beat, is conducted not only by proteins, but also electrical fields between heart muscle cells, a phenomenon called ephaptic coupling.
12 Feb 2025
Welcome to Pocket Science
12 Feb 2025
Are We Eating Ourselves to Death?
More than half of the calories consumed in the United States are ultra-processed. At the same time, food-related ailments, including heart disease and diabetes, are on the rise. Yet we struggle to resist foods that are the worst for us. (https://fbri.vtc.vt.edu/people-directory/primary-faculty/difeliceantonio.html)Alex DiFeliceantonio (https://fbri.vtc.vt.edu/people-directory/primary-faculty/difeliceantonio.html), an assistant professor and interim co-director of the Center for Health Behaviors Research at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute (https://fbri.vtc.vt.edu/), and leader of the DONNUT Lab (https://fbri.vtc.vt.edu/research/labs/difeliceantonio.html), investigates our food choices, how what we eat can change our brains, and whether our relationship with food can actually be an addiction. In the inaugural episode of Pocket Science, she explores those questions, and whether we can behave our way out of unhealthy eating when major food manufacturers have so effectively stacked the deck against us.
The DONNUT Lab seeks to understand the basic mechanisms of food choice, by both isolating the properties of foods in our modern food environment to evaluate their effect on physiology, brain function, and brain-physiology interaction, and trying to understand how individual differences in response to these food properties can confer risk or benefit for disease outcomes.
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