The Dish on Disease-in-a-Dish

**Dr. Kiki** (0:00)
This is TWIS, This Week in Science, episode number 1069, recorded on Wednesday, July 29th, 2026, The Dish on Disease-in-a-Dish. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with pancreas, disease and memory. But first, thanks to our amazing Patreon sponsors for their generous support of TWIS. You can become a part of the Patreon community at patreon.com/thisweekinscience.
Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer.
There once was a cell from a patient. It was always useful, adjacent. With more than a wish, it's now in a dish, and new therapies are possibly nascent. Learn all about it here. On This Week in Science, coming up next.
Good science, everyone. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. Back to bring you all the science that we love to talk about, things that have happened this week, last week, within a week, and more. We want to learn, we want to grow together and understand the world and be curious together. Thank you for joining me for this episode tonight. Blair is out and hopefully we'll be back again next week, but she's been hosting the show for the last two weeks without me as I had a little holiday, which was wonderful and it's so good to be back. Thank you all for being here tonight on all of our chat rooms. Tonight, we have an interview with Dr. Dannielle Engle, a Salk Institute researcher who studies the pancreas and organoids, disease-in-a-dish. I've also got a couple of new stories about memory, the brain, the stomach, how it's all involved, if I can remember them. But before we jump into everything, I want to remind you that subscribing to TWIS on whatever podcast platform you enjoy podcasts are, is the best way to find TWIS on a weekly basis, or a wonderful edited podcast. Or you can join us live Wednesday evenings, 8 p.m. Pacific time-ish on YouTube, Facebook, or Twitch. And if you need information about our shows, show notes, links to stories, all sorts of cool things, head over to twis.org. That's also where you find our Zazzle store link and our link to our Patreon, which Patreon is really how we support this show. We are listener-supported, so there are no commercial biases. So thank you for supporting TWIS. Thank you for being here tonight. Everyone in the chat room, let's have a great show. It's time for me to introduce our guest for the evening, Dr. Dannielle Engle. Dr. Engle is an assistant professor at the Salk Institute specializing in the early detection and treatment of pancreatic cancer. She received her BA from Northwestern University in Biology and Asian Studies and her PhD in Biology from the University of California, San Diego.
She recently published a paper in Cell-Stem Cell describing a new platform using patient-derived pancreatic organoids for disease study and development of personalized treatments.
I think this sounds like a really exciting direction. We've talked about organoids a lot on the show over the years, but I think it's really important to get somebody who's really involved in the research and use of this kind of a platform to come and talk with us about how it works, the challenges, all these things. Thank you for joining me, Dr. Engle. Lovely to be here.

**Dr. Dannielle Engle** (4:24)
Thanks for having me.

**Dr. Kiki** (4:25)
You're welcome. So first off, before we get into the study and the nut of the nitty-gritty of everything that you've been working on, how did you actually come to start studying pancreatic disorders in the first place?

**Dr. Dannielle Engle** (4:40)
So I would say that my journey has actually not been super typical for a scientist. I actually went to college for music before switching to biology. A lot of that had to do with using creative part of my brain, but also figuring out that while I might not be the best test taker, I'm really good in the lab.
So for how I got into the pancreas, I started off working in genetics, but then I moved into cancer pretty quickly because my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. About 10 years later, my uncle was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And so for me, it's been kind of a personal motivation combined with this really scientific drive to understand why is it so hard to treat and find early?

**Dr. Kiki** (5:25)
Why is it so hard?

**Dr. Dannielle Engle** (5:28)
I know, right? I mean, I wish I had all the answers to that. I think that if you zoom back out and you look at the incidence of pancreatic cancers, it's relatively uncommon. So there'll be about 60,000 to 70,000 new cases this year.
And so it's a low incidence cancer, but it has a very high mortality. And so I think part of the problem is that means that screening a general population is not what insurance companies would call cost-effective, which is a hard statistic and calculus for me to learn since I'm a patient advocate, but at the same time, positive do do harm. And I think that's the big challenge. And so that's also how I got started in pancreatitis because that's a major positive for any test that's trying to detect pancreatic cancer. So they're two very similar diseases in terms of their biomarkers, but their outcomes are very, very different.