Pfizer's Science Will Win returns with Dr. Raven Baxter and NASA astrophysicist Dr. Ronald Gamble as co-hosts

Launched by Pfizer in 2021, the award-winning podcast spent its fifth season on four emerging medical technologies, with two co-hosts for the first time

October 28, 2025Partnerships

Dr. Raven Baxter, wearing headphones and black-and-white patterned glasses, speaks to the camera. — Baxter in the trailer for the fifth season of Science Will Win. Photo: Pfizer video

The fifth season of Pfizer's Science Will Win podcast opened on Oct. 28, 2025, with Dr. Raven Baxter asking listeners about medicine they never notice.

In the first episode, "The Case of the Missing Vaccine," she cited safe lead levels in water and vaccines for children and adults. "All of that stuff is really easy to take for granted, but one of them might have saved your life and you wouldn't even know it," she said.

Pfizer's announcement that day said the season "introduces a pair of new hosts and a new format." Baxter co-hosted with Dr. Ronald Gamble, whom Pfizer called "a theoretical astrophysicist at NASA." They took turns leading four weekly episodes on conjugate vaccines, multispecific antibodies, molecular glues and antibody-drug conjugates. Baxter led the first and third. "We're partners, we love to nerd out," Gamble said in the trailer.

Dr. Ronald Gamble, in headphones and glasses, smiles at a microphone in front of a chalkboard covered in equations. Co-host Dr. Ronald Gamble in the Season 5 trailer. Image: Pfizer video

The season's first and last subjects were active areas of Pfizer research when it launched. In August, Pfizer began BEATRIX, a Phase 3 trial of a group B strep vaccine for pregnant women. The bacteria lead to nearly 100,000 newborn deaths and at least 46,000 stillbirths a year, a 2021 report from the World Health Organization found. No vaccine was yet available, it said. On Oct. 18, Astellas and Pfizer reported Phase 3 results for an antibody-drug conjugate given with an immunotherapy. The pairing cut the risk of death by 50% for certain bladder cancer patients.

Old ideas, new medicines

Throughout the season, Baxter traced breakthroughs back to decades of earlier work. The first conjugate vaccine arrived in 1987, she told listeners. Scientists had found in the 1920s that pairing with a protein could help the immune response. "It took decades of trial and error and scientific progress to actually build on that and create something that was safe and effective for people," she said.

She compared conjugate vaccines to a charm bracelet, with the bacteria's sugar as the charm and a protein as the band. "And so conjugate vaccines take what used to be forgettable and turn it into a full bracelet that your immune system can't ignore," she said. Later she added, "We're standing on the shoulders of giants."

Dr. Raven Baxter, in headphones and patterned glasses, looks into the camera mid-sentence. Baxter in the Season 5 trailer, where she promised listeners some history, biology and chemistry. Image: Pfizer video

In the finale, she traced how antibody-drug conjugates waited decades for better antibodies, linkers and drug payloads. "So what used to be an almost idea is now a reality," she said. "And that's why I say science doesn't miss. Sometimes it just takes a couple of rounds to get the mix right."

From broad treatments to precise ones

"I feel like specificity has been a major theme across many of the therapeutic modalities we've talked about this season," she said in the finale. She added, "We're transitioning from sweeping solutions to a diverse range of distinct treatment options." She called antibody-drug conjugates "a ride share for drugs" that "take the chemo payload and drop it off right where it needs to go."

In the third episode, she explained that some molecular glues tag a cancer-causing protein so the cell destroys it. "If the cancer-causing protein you're trying to degrade is a locked door, you don't want your molecular glue to be a skeleton key," she said.

She also described her own lab work. "I worked in high throughput drug discovery where we were testing thousands of molecular candidates against many different types of cells," she told listeners.

Patients and access to care

In the first episode, Baxter interviewed Dr. Carol Baker, a pediatric infectious disease specialist. People call Baker "the godmother of group B strep and maternal vaccination," Baxter told listeners. Most U.S. births happen in hospitals that can give intravenous antibiotics during labor, she noted, "but in many parts of the world, that's just not realistic."

"And so developing a vaccine is more than making things like more convenient," she said. "It's also inclusive of giving people around the world a choice and reducing unnecessary antibiotic use and protecting babies in a way that's safer, stronger, and more sustainable."

Later episodes featured an eczema patient advocate and a daughter who cared for her father through bladder cancer. The show's producers visited Pfizer labs in Pearl River, New York, and La Jolla, California.

Science communication after the pandemic

"The old way was just publish, present, and move on. But during the pandemic, that stopped working," Baxter said in the finale. The new era changed her own process, she said. It "taught me that innovation isn't necessarily reinventing the wheel, but sometimes it's about giving old ideas a new voice."

In November 2024, the Pew Research Center reported on Americans' confidence in scientists to act in the public's best interests. It found 76% had a great deal or a fair amount, down from 87% in April 2020, at the start of the pandemic.