Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Dr. Jill L. Maron describes the work she does from both a clinical and a research standpoint
• What are the benefits of using saliva in diagnosing newborns, and how have things advanced over the last 15 years?
• What are some of the adverse effects associated with regularly drawing blood from babies?
• How did doing a TEDx talk provide Dr. Maron with growth opportunities?
• Dr. Maron’s current focus: diagnosing infection through saliva
• When did Dr. Maron first become interested in saliva?
• How does Dr. Maron balance the demands of her work with her personal life?
• Dr. Maron discusses how reading fiction has influenced her writing and shares some of her favorite books

In this episode…

When babies are sick, they can’t describe their symptoms, so you need another way of assessing what’s wrong. Drawing blood is one option for diagnosing problems, but sticking newborns with needles over and over can be traumatic — and might have long-lasting adverse effects. A less invasive method of identifying issues is through saliva — but what can spit actually tell us about the health of a baby?

Dr. Jill L. Maron, Executive Director of the Mother Infant Research Institute at Tufts Medical Center, claims that a small drop of spit can tell us quite a bit. She’s been at the forefront of salivary diagnostics in neonatal care for the past 15 years and is currently researching to see if saliva can be used to diagnose infections. According to Dr. Maron, biofluid will remain a part of diagnostics well into the future as she and other saliva investigators continue to advance the field.

In this episode of the Measure Success Podcast, Carl J. Cox talks with Dr. Jill L. Maron, Executive Director of the Mother Infant Research Institute at Tufts Medical Center, about using salivary diagnostics in neonatal care. Dr. Maron explains how salivary diagnostics have evolved over the last 15 years, why she became interested in studying saliva, and where her current research is focused. Plus, Dr. Maron and Carl J. Cox discuss sports, books, and their grandmothers. Stay tuned!

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Dr. Jill L. Maron on LinkedIn
• Dr. Jill L. Maron at Tufts Medical Center
• Mother Infant Research Institute at Tufts Medical Center
• “Secrets I Learned from the Saliva of Newborns” on TEDx
• Paul D. Slowey on LinkedIn
• Biomed Diagnostics, Inc.
• Marathon: The Ultimate Training Guide by Hal Higdon
• Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine: A Novel by Gail Honeyman
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
• The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddharth S. Mukerji
• The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddharth S. Mukerji
• Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight
• 40 Strategy
• Contact 40 Strategy
• Carl J. Cox on LinkedIn

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is sponsored by 40 Strategy.

40 Strategy provides strategic planning and consulting to help organizations realize and achieve their dreams by creating and measuring KPIs for success.

Unfortunately, most organizations only spend 2% of their time — or about 40 hours per year — on building an effective strategy.

Increasing the success of those 40 hours is what 40 Strategy does because your success is their passion — and that’s why organizations look to them for guidance. 

Not only does 40 Strategy help you craft and implement an effective strategy, but they’ll also work to facilitate teams with proven practices and help with your scenario planning.

Harvard research shows that you can triple your success when you use the right Key Performance Indicators. Who doesn’t want that?

If you have questions, you can reach out through their website or email them at catch@40strategy.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Measure Success Podcast where we feature top leaders on how they measure success in their business and life. Now, let’s learn from their experiences.

Carl J. Cox 0:18

Carl J. Cox here and I’m the host of the Measure Success Podcast where I talk with top leaders about effective strategies that inspire success. This episode is brought to you by 40 Strategy at 40 Strategy. What we do is we provide strategic planning consulting, to help organizations realize and achieve their dreams. Jill, basically what we do is we help companies and organizations create strategic plans and measure the right KPIs for success. A recent study showed that only 10% of organizations actually complete two thirds of their strategic objectives. Don’t you think? That’s pretty crazy. I do need. And so at 40 Strategy, your success is our passion. That’s why organizations call on us to help. We found in through Harvard Business Research that if you actually focus on the right key performance indicators, you can triple the likelihood of your success and who wouldn’t want that. So emails today a catch@40strategy.com or visit our website at 40strategy.com and with that, we’d like to go to our next part where we talk about one of our shout out to Paul Slowey. Paul Slowey he is the CEO for Biomed Diagnostics, Inc.

, where their focus has been on saliva diagnostics to help cure and detect diseases, Paul as the person who referred our current guests, and thank you, Paul for that and that our current guest is Dr. Jill Maron, and Dr. Maron received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and both are MD and MPH degrees from Tulane University. She completed her pediatric residency at Brown University and her fellowship in newborn medicine at Tufts Medical Center. She’s a professor of pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology at Tufts University School of Medicine, the executive director of the Mother Infant Research Institute at Tufts Medical Center and the vice chair of pediatric research at Tufts Children’s Hospital. She also serves as the CO editor in chief for the clinical therapeutics. For over 15 years, her research has focused on developing an integrated novel slavery and genetic diagnostic platforms into neonatal and maternal care for rapid assessment of development, and pending morbid diets and genetic disorders. She is internationally recognized for a contribution to the development of neonatal slavery diagnostic platforms and currently serves on as a multi epi on three NIH funded multicenter clinical trials, she has published extensively in the field. Jill was also a TEDx speaker, on Secrets I Learned from the Saliva of Newborns. And I encourage you all to listen to that recording for March of 2009. And Jill, welcome to the show.

Dr. Jill L. Maron 3:00

Thanks so much for having me. And that was that was a great introduction. So thank you.

Carl J. Cox 3:05

You’re absolutely welcome. And it’s truly a privilege to have you on we had a very fun call when we were talking about coming onto the show a few months ago. And, and so first of all, for those who are who don’t know about you, can you tell us a little bit more about your current role what you do?

Dr. Jill L. Maron 3:21

Sure. So, from a clinical standpoint, I practice neonatology which is caring for babies born very early or sick. So you could be born at term but you are not well. But from a research standpoint, I tried to develop ask days are tasks that I can use in this patient population, which is very tiny, very vulnerable, and doesn’t really have a lot of blood, for example, to give for diagnostic essays. So I focused my attention on saliva, in large part because it’s easy to get the babies will always make more of it. And it actually is a wealth of information that we can learn not just what’s going on in the mouth of the baby, but really what’s going on throughout the body, including their development. So really, the focus of my career going on almost 20 plus years now has been how do we utilize that bio fluid bring it into the Nick you the neonatal intensive care unit impact and improve.

Carl J. Cox 4:24

So, I find this such a fascinating topic, because so So historically prior to this, and I guess currently today, probably in most situations, how are people how are doctors in neonatal care, getting these diagnostics traditionally,

Dr. Jill L. Maron 4:39

for the most part, everything is done in blood, by and large. There are exceptions to that, but usually the caregiver does the clinical exam, looks at how the baby’s doing and then there are blast days and saliva will never fully replace all blood assets. But there are certain things that we simply can’t keep sticking a baby with a needle. or can’t keep getting blood for. And we want serial assessments, we want to be able to look in real time, several times a week to see where are you today? Are you getting sick? Are you? can we predict neurodevelopmental problems? What’s the next challenge for us? And we need a different biofluid. And that’s why my booth is is really bad in saliva.

Carl J. Cox 5:25

And so you’re clearly on the forefront of this research of what’s been taking place. How How many other research institutes are doing some like this? And how much is this in practice today? Or is this still in the developmental stage?

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