Alzheimer’s Breakthrough with Dr. Josh Helman, MD
Oct 15, 2026 · 47 min · 13 segments
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Julia BelkGuest
Josh HelmanHost
And, uh, ju- just background for, for listeners, Julia just published within the last few months, uh, an amazing paper in Nature magazine.

Her paper was fast-tracked because it is so important in terms of understanding the basic immune system of the brain.

And, and, and I see that in my Alzheimer's patients and others, where often there are huge, uh... a huge component is, uh, the immune system in the brain.

It's been, it's been a very kind of long-term effort, as you mentioned, huge team, team effort across Stanford, um, and even the University of Washington, and we're just really excited to, to see it out and get the word out about these new findings.

So if we could just take a, a, a step back, your background, you actually undergraduate MIT electrical engineering, and I, I did a little bit of studying.

I went to medical school at Harvard MIT, so I know from, from my background, the electrical engineers were looked up as like the highest of the high.

Um, so needless to say, y- you're very intelligent, and you're willing to tackle hard problems.

But how in the world did you go from electrical engineering to studying the immune system and the brain?

Well, so it's, in my opinion, a very exciting time to, um, you know, for people with quantitative backgrounds to really get into biology because, of course, the human body and the brain in particular are incredibly complex.

And over the past couple decades, there's really been an explosion in tools and technologies that allow us to measure the body and the brain in some of its complexity.

And, uh, ju- just background for, for listeners, Julia just published within the last few months, uh, an amazing paper in Nature magazine.

Her paper was fast-tracked because it is so important in terms of understanding the basic immune system of the brain.

And, and, and I see that in my Alzheimer's patients and others, where often there are huge, uh... a huge component is, uh, the immune system in the brain.

It's been, it's been a very kind of long-term effort, as you mentioned, huge team, team effort across Stanford, um, and even the University of Washington, and we're just really excited to, to see it out and get the word out about these new findings.

So if we could just take a, a, a step back, your background, you actually undergraduate MIT electrical engineering, and I, I did a little bit of studying.

I went to medical school at Harvard MIT, so I know from, from my background, the electrical engineers were looked up as like the highest of the high.

Um, so needless to say, y- you're very intelligent, and you're willing to tackle hard problems.

But how in the world did you go from electrical engineering to studying the immune system and the brain?

Well, so it's, in my opinion, a very exciting time to, um, you know, for people with quantitative backgrounds to really get into biology because, of course, the human body and the brain in particular are incredibly complex.

And over the past couple decades, there's really been an explosion in tools and technologies that allow us to measure the body and the brain in some of its complexity.
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