The Blood Test That Could Change Cancer Detection | Stanford’s Dr. Ash Alizadeh

On Physician’s Pulse, host Dr. Ramin Manshadi welcomes Dr. Ash Alizadeh, Stanford professor of medicine, oncology and hematology and head of the Genomic Program at the Stanford Cancer Institute, to discuss his path as a physician-scientist spanning patient care, cancer biology, genomics, computational medicine, and AI. Dr. Alizadeh shares how immigrating to the U.S. and his mother’s cancer shaped his perspective, explains what distinguishes physician-scientist training, and highlights the role of mentorship and persistence in finding mentors. He describes balancing lymphoma-focused clinic with running a ~20-person lab, collaborations, publishing, and translating discoveries into clinical tools. The conversation covers chronic stress and physician self-care, defines cancer as heterogeneous diseases driven by cellular changes, and explores cancer genomics, liquid biopsy, early detection challenges and false positives, AI’s promise and limits, resilience through failure, and a 20-year vision for routine liquid-biopsy monitoring and more precise, evidence-based cancer classification