Empowered Patient Podcast

Niels Riedemann, the CEO, Founder, and Executive Director of the Board of InflaRx, explains that InflaRx develops pioneering anti-inflammatory therapeutics against a specific portion of the complement cascade, a part of the body’s immune system that responds to infectious microbes. By applying its proprietary monoclonal anti-C5a and anti-C5aR technologies, InflaRx hopes to affect the progression of a wide variety of inflammatory diseases. Niels explains, "Absolutely. So, I was a postdoc and research fellow at the University of Michigan and I researched this immune response I was talking about with another fellow in settings of sepsis of devastating, life-threatening inflammation and the other fellow and myself found it so intriguing that we ended up founding a company saying we're going to one day hopefully save people's lives with this approach by controlling this immune response. And when COVID came along, while we had a focus on other diseases and we have a key focus on devastating chronic diseases as well in the immune dermatological space and others, when COVID came along, we had all this knowledge and all this work in the immune response in life-threatening infections including in other viruses with our drug, for example, in an influenza type of virus. But we had not tested it, of course, in COVID or humans with this disease." "We felt we had to do something about it. We were very sure that this was a potential lifesaving approach. So we ended up running what we believe is the largest global study, a one-to-one randomized placebo-controlled study that was powered to show a benefit, a survival benefit, in the most severely sick COVID-patients. And when I say most severely sick, I really mean patients that need invasive mechanical ventilation or even lung replacement therapy, also called ECMO. So that's our focus, and we ended up showing a survival benefit. We may be talking about this a bit today, but it’s an interesting story and a life endeavor. I should probably also mention that in order to better understand the other side of the research part, I became a physician, and I actually ran a large academic ICU in Germany for almost seven years, and also enrolled patients in trials. So, I know how it is as an intensive care physician to take care of patients when they're that devastatingly sick. The lots of motivations within the company, and we are really glad that we could bring this drug forward to help patients." InflaRx.de Download the transcript here

Michael Oleksiw is the CEO of Pleio, a company focused on addressing the emotional barriers to patient engagement and medication adherence that medical professionals often overlook. Emotional barriers like loneliness, fear, and stigma can impact patients of all ages and backgrounds when they are facing a health challenge. Pleio uses technology and a peer-to-patient model to personalize interactions with empathetic humans, provide ongoing patient support, track emotional patterns, and bring pharmacists in to work with patients taking multiple medications or with chronic conditions. Michael explains, "Our focus on the emotional barriers is meant to complement what’s out there today. The bulk of the focus when it comes to engaging patients and supporting patients is really on supporting the transaction, ensuring that a patient can get their medication, that they can get it cost-effectively, that they can pick it up, that it gets into their hands. But once they’re at home, everything gets real really fast and they’re faced with a variety of emotions such as loneliness, stigma, fear, etc. The American Medical Association recognizes that five of the eight major barriers to adherence are emotional, as I mentioned. So we try to stay in that swim lane and connect with the patient to target those barriers as a complement to all the stuff already being done out there." "You can say that we break White Coat syndrome in that we get the patient to focus on what’s important to them. Many times, patients don’t know or are intimidated by their healthcare professionals and don’t know how to engage in conversation. So one of the things we do is instill confidence so they can engage in fruitful conversations with their pharmacists and the like. So, the best way to think of it is we’re an extension of the pharmacy. We bring that trust and the care in the pharmacy into the home with what we call a peer-to-patient model where patients engage in conversation with people just like them to complement the baseline they received at the pharmacy." "Technology helps us be more efficient in terms of the patients we target, the words we choose, and the times we call. So, our view on technology is we use technology to support human interaction and make it better, optimize it, and make it more efficient, but not replace it. So, we don’t use technology to pretend to be human. Humans do a good job at that. I think humans could own being human. Technology is meant to support the human to be more efficient, make things more personalized, and take that step back to see the big picture and address trends over time." #Pleio #MedicationAdherence #PatientEngagement #EmotionalBarriers #MedAI #DigitalHealth pleio.com Download the transcript here

Dan Levendowski, Co-Founder and President, and Chris Berka, Co-Founder and CEO of Advanced Brain Monitoring, have developed medical devices that measure brain activity through electroencephalography (EEG) during awake and sleeping states. These easy-to-use EEG devices can be used at home and in a clinic to identify biomarkers for cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases. The company has built large databases of EEG data from healthy individuals and those with various neurodegenerative diseases, which allows them to compare a patient's brain activity to healthy controls and track changes over time. Dan explains, "We're now in year seven of a large longitudinal study where we've identified and extracted these measures of the brain's electrical activity under different conditions that help us differentiate or characterize whether the person has normal cognition or their sleep looks like somebody with normal cognition. Or how the brain responds to certain stimuli and if it looks like somebody with Parkinson's disease or early Alzheimer's disease. We do that both during sleep and during wake." Chris elaborates, "What differentiates our products is that Dan mentioned that we've received a little over $40 million in funding from NIH, DARPA, and other funding sources. And that has allowed us to create very large databases with tens of thousands of recordings from healthy controls. So people ages 6 to 96. For any new patient that comes in, we can compare their brain to a group of people in the same age range and sex and say, how far are you quantitatively from your healthy control peers?" "We print everything, all of the EEG sensors, on a very lightweight flex cable, which is easily applied and hits all the target sites according to the neurology 10-20 system. That is fully disposable. So after you take it off, you discard it. It's only used once. Then, all of the electronics for our system, which does the amplification of the signals, the digitization of the signals, and then sending via Bluetooth to a laptop or a handheld or desktop computer. All of that is in a very small electronics box worn on the head. The entire system weighs less than three ounces. So we've had patients wear it for many hours and forget they're wearing it. It's so lightweight and comfortable." #AdvancedBrainMonitoring #EEG #NeuroBiomarkers #Cognition #NeuroDiagnosticDevice #AlzheimersDisease #Dementia #ParkinsonsDisease #LewyBodyDementia advancedbrainmonitoring.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Julie Schulz, VP of product at Avalon Healthcare Solutions, a company that helps health plans manage their laboratory spend and benefits by contracting with labs and analyzing lab data. Lab tests are important for identifying the right patients for GLP-1 drugs and assessing their cardiometabolic health. While GLP-1 drugs were initially developed for diabetes they have been found to have broader benefits in treating conditions like obesity, heart disease, and kidney disease. Avalon's real-time access to lab data can help health plans and providers better identify appropriate patients for GLP-1 drugs and address health equity and access issues. Julie explains, "Labs are increasingly looking at biomarkers that provide an overall sense of patient health. Molecular diagnostics, including genetic testing, is on the upswing. Understanding the complexities of that testing and the clinical decisions that come from it is more and more important for health plan employers in the broader healthcare ecosystem." "So GLP-1 drugs were initially indicated for diabetes and help patients who struggle to control their diabetes with other medications to help bring down their hemoglobin A1c. But we found they have a much broader effect on the entire cardio kidney metabolic syndrome. Increasingly, clinicians in the American Heart Association are recognizing that cardiorenal metabolic syndrome is a collection of related disorders that involve cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, liver disease, and others as well. What's interesting about GLP-1s is they've been shown to have an impact on many of these systems." "Now all of those labs can come together and can actually be used to calculate a score of a patient's tenure and 30-year risk of major adverse cardiac events. So, heart attack and stroke, but also heart failure. So, bringing all those things together will inform the patient's broader cardiometabolic health status and can also help start identifying patients who will benefit the most from these drugs." #AvalonHCS #LaboratoryBenefitsManager #HealthPlans #HealthEquity #GLP1 #CardiometabolicDiseases #Obesity #KidneyDisease #HeartDisease avalonhcs.com Download the transcript here

Adrian Mendes, CEO of Perimeter Medical Imaging AI, is solving the problem of margin assessment in cancer surgery. Surgeons often have to perform a second surgery on breast cancer patients because they are unable to completely remove all of the cancerous cells the first time. The company has developed Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) imaging technology that allows surgeons to see cells at a microscopic level in real-time during surgery, helping them remove the tumor and all surrounding cancerous tissue. Adrian explains, "The surgeon is trying to ensure that when they extract the tumor and the cancer, there is a margin of healthy cells around it. Studies have shown that if they can achieve that, and with breast cancer, that margin needs to be two millimeters generally, then the likelihood of them having left cancer cells back in the body goes down drastically. This is every surgeon's objective for cancer treatment. We help the surgeons ensure that they've achieved what they call clean margins." "Yes, it's quite significant. So, for breast cancer surgery alone, it's about one in every five surgeries are unsuccessful because the margins aren't clean, and then the patient has to come back for a second surgery. So, there are about 300,000 breast cancer surgeries per year in the United States. If you think about 20% of that, there are a lot of women that are having to go back for a second surgery every year. That's just in the United States. And it's a global problem." "What's unique about our technology is we use an imaging tech called OCT or Optical Coherence Tomography that allows images to be created down at around 15-micron width level. And that's small enough to be able to distinguish cells. And so with that, it just gives the surgeon so much more ability to see what they're looking at." "The next generation uses the same imaging modality, the OCT imaging, but it adds an artificial intelligence and AI layer to it. So what we've done is trained an AI algorithm to recognize suspicious areas inside images of breast tissue. And these suspicious areas are indicative of cancer. The way we train the model is we have a library of about 2 million images of breast tissue, both cancerous and healthy tissue, and we've got labels that have been provided by pathologists." #PerimeterMedical #Oncology #BreastCancerSurgery #OCT #Tumors #MedAI perimetermed.com Download the transcript here

Brent Lucas, CEO of Envoy Medical, highlights the lack of innovation in hearing aids and the need to better address hearing health. Envoy has developed fully implanted hearing devices that provide 24/7 hearing assistance without the need for daily recharging of the battery. With the introduction of over-the-counter hearing aids and the advanced Apple AirPods Pro 2, customer options have been expanded, making it easier to address some forms of hearing loss. Implanted devices eliminate the limitations of external hearing aids and reduce the impact of hearing loss on their daily lives. Brent explains, "Part of the problem in the hearing loss industry has been that it's not well understood. So there has not been a great deal of competition and innovation in the hearing loss world. Most of us have thought about hearing loss and how it's addressed by looking to our grandparents, the elders. Plenty of people joke about our dads or our grandfathers not being able to hear our grandmothers. When I tell people I'm in the hearing industry, the first thing that they say is, I can't hear you. And I always fall for it. And I say, I'm in the hearing industry, and they come clean that it was a joke. At the end of the day, there are unmet needs in finding solutions for people that are not just the status quo. That's really where Envoy Medical is building products that are fully implanted, in a sense, a better life because they're not tied to their hearing loss." "Right now, the current solutions on the market are all external products that need to be taken off at night or around water in the shower, during strenuous activity, working out, sweating too much, that sort of thing. You have to take your external device off. Our devices are fully implanted, meaning you can be capable of hearing 24/7, hearing all day, every day. We think that's the right thing to do for a patient because your hearing loss, after all, is a 24-hour problem. It shouldn't be that your solution is only on for part of the day." #EnvoyMedical #HearingLoss #Acclaim #HearingAids #CochlearImplant $COCH #HearingHealth envoymedical.com Download the transcript here

Caleb Manscill, President of Vyne Medical, has a mission to present a holistic view of data, from origination to use, within a healthcare organization. The goal is to guide them to find ways to streamline the workflow, save time, reduce errors and costs, and improve patient outcomes. Using AI to handle faxes, data entry, and other administrative tasks can free up staff to handle issues that require human intervention. Vyne Medical provides insights about implementing technology and overcoming cultural resistance to changes in healthcare organizations. Caleb explains, "We've got multiple use cases, but I'll speak to two. The first one is the simple handling of faxes. There's lots of unstructured data coming into different points of care. In this case, I'll talk about the hospital, but there are lots of referrals being made. There are lab reports being sent and there's data that needs to be appended through HIM. Often, this data will come in through the fax machine as unstructured data, and individuals will pick up this paper. And we're talking, again, going back to the paper and picking it up and keying it in. There's the risk, not to mention miskeying it or accuracy. Still, that process is potentially taking place anywhere. If it's a simple patient order, it could take a few minutes. If it's an extensive lab report, it could take upwards of 20 minutes. The automation or AI utilized within our product suite and platform can take that down to 30 seconds or even just a few seconds, depending on the workflow that needs to be initiated." "That's why we exist in that very specific use case of fax management. The way that our solution works is it streamlines the whole process so that there isn't any paper handling. So it's almost as if it's being sent electronically, through the internet, or however you want it to be. What's most important to us is that if they're not going to change their behavior, at least we can meet them where they are and streamline it as if they had adopted the most up-to-date APIs or ways of sending those data." #VyneMedical #Workflow #Hospitals #Automation #HospitalWorkflow vynemedical.com Download the transcript here

Andre Esteva is the CEO and Co-Founder of Artera, a company focused on improving prostate cancer diagnostics. The company uses an AI-driven test, validated in large-scale clinical trials, to analyze a tumor biopsy or surgical specimen and predict response to therapy and likely long-term outcomes. This helps inform treatment decisions, reduce the risk of over-treatment, and support healthcare equity in diverse patient populations. Plans are underway to expand the AI-driven diagnostic tools to other solid tumor types leveraging the ability of AI to learn across different cancers. Andre explains, "In general, when it comes to the treatment of prostate cancer, and this is true for most cancers, clinicians tend to be conservative, rightfully so, and there is a tendency to overtreat patients. You see, when it comes to assigning a therapy to a patient, there's this notion of the optimal therapy, and you want to get it right. If you undertreat your patient, the disease will progress, and nobody wants their cancer to progress. So as a result, patients tend to be overtreated when too much therapy is applied. While that does support killing the cancer, it also comes with a series of negative side effects. Real toxicities occur, and this is especially true in the case of prostate cancer." "The ArteraAI test is an AI that will look at an image of a patient's tumor, specifically a digitized image of the patient's histopathology of a biopsy or surgical specimen. It will look at all the patient's cells and the tumor morphology and the tumor microenvironment, everything else that you'll see on a histopathology slide in the form of a digital image. From that, it'll generate a report for the patient's clinician with two pieces of really important information on it. The first piece is how that patient will respond to therapy. The AI will predict the response to therapy. The second piece is prognostic information. So, the AI will prognosticate patient outcomes. Outcomes here mean will the patient's cancer metastasize in the next five or 10 years, will the patient die of cancer, will dangerous biochemical levels recur in time and so forth. And in doing so, we help to inform treatments." #Artera #MedAI #AI #ProstateCancer #CancerDiagnostics #Tumors #HealthEquity artera.ai Download the transcript here

Len D'Avolio is the CEO of Blue Circle Health a program launched with the support of the Helmsley Charitable Trust to provide care, education, and support to adults with type 1 diabetes. The program provides free, remote support for 6 months including access to continuous glucose monitors, endocrinologists, counseling, insurance navigation, and affordable insulin and clinical care. The program aims to address the care gaps that exists for people with T1D and support them to better manage their condition. Len explains, "The Helmsley Charitable Trust, which is a major philanthropic donor to the space dedicated to improving the lives of people with T1D, basically recognized that there's this big care gap between what people with T1D need to live healthy lives and what the US healthcare system tends to provide, based on what is or isn't reimbursable. So, they gathered a bunch of experts and conducted a number of focus groups and decided they'd like to close that gap. They formed Blue Circle Health as a free care education and support program designed to work with folks for about six months, trying to empower and educate them and close the gap." "Education itself is not as widely reimbursed as it should be, and this particular condition requires a thousand more decisions a day than the average person dealing with a health problem because you're playing the role of your pancreas. You're having to understand your blood glucose levels, the foods you're about to eat, and then it's one of the few diseases in which we ask people to measure out and administer a potentially deadly bolus of drugs many times a day." #BlueCircleHealth #T1D #Type1 #Type1Diabetes #DiabetesAwareness #CGM #TypeOneDiabetes #TypeOne #EmpoweredPatient #Florida #Ohio #Delaware #Maine #Vermont bluecirclehealth.org Download the transcript here

Henry O'Connell is the CEO and Co-Founder of Canary Speech, which analyzes voice biomarkers to detect various medical conditions, including neurological disorders like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and cognitive decline. Their approach looks at the underlying mechanisms of speech controlled by the central nervous system rather than the words spoken. The technology has been validated to correlate with clinical diagnoses at a high accuracy level. It provides real-time, objective assessments to healthcare providers, which could help overcome biases and reveal early signs of the presence of a disease. Henry explains, "Canary Speech is now about eight years old. Jeff Adams, my business partner and friend, and I created Canary Speech to evaluate voice for a range of different human conditions and diseases. We actually established an approach that was unique in the market. Jeff has a history of innovation in voice and voice analysis. He was the lead that developed the first natural language processing commercial tools. He also led the team that developed Dragon naturally speaking, the most prominent tool for transcription services in healthcare. He also led the team that built the Amazon Echo." "With that deep experience and 40 years of relationship together and friendship, we created Canary speech. Canary looks at sub-language characters and elements. We look at 15 million different data elements every minute, and we process those for a range of different diseases, progressive neurological diseases, cognitive health, and behavioral health. We're beginning to build models for children's health." "Everything that we have built has been built in clinical settings with peer review with organizations such as The Harvard Beth Israel, Hackensack Meridian, Intermountain Healthcare, Cala Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, Belfast Hospital, and Alster Hospital in Belfast, and also National Institutes of Health in Japan. So, we use those rigorous environments and those clinical settings to build local biomarker algorithms that can identify." #CanarySpeech #Biomarkers #NeurodegenerativeDiseases #Alzheimers #Parkinsons #CognitiveDecline canaryspeech.com Download the transcript here

Greg Mayes, President and CEO of Reunion Neuroscience, is developing a psychedelic therapy for the treatment of postpartum depression. This serious acute, non-chronic mental health condition affects an estimated 20% of women after giving birth. A phase two trial is underway to evaluate how RE-104, a rapid-acting psilocybin-like novel molecule, can help women with moderate to severe postpartum depression get faster relief compared to existing treatments. Greg explains, "The course of our psychedelic administration is significant because we believe it can be shorter in time period than other psilocybin-like treatments. In our case, we were able to establish it as 3.7 hours. Because it's a psychedelic and it is for an acute and non-chronic indication, we believe that women who take our product will see a rapid uptake and potentially day of administration benefit of the psychedelic therapy. Our phase two study is called the RECONNECT study because it's named for women reconnecting with themselves, their families, their children, and the world around them." "Postpartum depression is considered to be a subset depressive of major depressive disorder, major depressive order that's not put into remission after two treatments becomes treatment-resistant depression. There's also generalized anxiety disorder. We believe that RE104 and our lead product have a lot of legs to potentially go in this area. But as the CEO of the company, we want to stay focused. We know what we need to do first and foremost is we need to get our RECONNECT phase two proof of concept study and women with moderate to severe postpartum depression recruited. And we need to show that we can work there. Once we show that, we'll pivot to other indications. One is adjustment disorder in patients with cancer and with other major medical illnesses like Parkinson's disease, ALS, MS, or pulmonary fibrosis." #ReunionNeuro #PostPartumDepression #PPD #Psychedelics #Mothers #MentalHealth #Depression #RECONNECTStudy reunionneuro.com PPDReconnectstudy.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Adrian Quartel, Chief Medical Officer at Zevra Therapeutics, has received FDA approval for their drug MIPLYFFA in combination with miglustat, the first treatment in the US for Niemann-Pick type C, an ultra-orphan disease. This hard to diagnose, rare genetic lysosomal storage disorder affects the recycling of cholesterol and lipids in cells, leading to neurological and physical problems. The Amplify Assist program has been set up to help patients access and afford the treatment. Adrian elaborates, "Niemann-Pick C is a very rare or ultra-orphan disease. It's one of what is considered a lysosomal storage disorder. I'll try to explain a little bit about what that means. So lysosomes are little organelles or little systems within the cell that are basically the waste disposal system from the cell. They break down worn-out parts on the inside of the cells, or they break down harmful molecules and waste products. They're effectively recycling materials in the cell. So, any lysosomal storage disorder actually affects the system where waste products are recycled within the cell. In Niemann-Pick C disease, it's specific for lipids such as cholesterol or sphingolipids inside the cell that need to be recycled." "The early onset of the late infantile onset usually occurs before the age of 10. Then, you have the juvenile and adult-onset, which usually occurs after the age of 10 and have different types of symptoms. Once you have the neurological symptoms, they usually start with delay in motor milestones in the younger children. But most often, we see a diagnosis happening between the ages of, say, three and seven, starting with problems in walking, stability or gait problems, clumsiness, delay in speech, or losing the ability to speak appropriately, as well as seizures, problems at school, problems to follow direction at school, some behavioral problems." #ZevraTherapeutics #RareDisease #OrphanDisease #NiemannPick #NPC #NiemannPickAwareness #PediatricRareDisease zevra.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Shika Pappoe, CMO and COO of Carna Health is working to identify and treat chronic kidney disease earlier through screening tests. This is a breakthrough for a disease that often shows no symptoms until the damage is irreversible. Using technology and AI-powered risk prediction models to improve early detection and intervention for CKD can help slow or even halt the progression of the disease. In recent pilot programs in Bermuda and Cameroon, Carna Health found high rates of CKD and is working to connect those patients with the necessary care. Shika explains, "Chronic kidney disease is a condition that has been growing over the years. We know that diabetes and hypertension are leading causes, and currently, CKD is the 10th leading cause of death globally. And by 2040, it's estimated that it will be the fifth cause of death. Carna is working on finding ways to identify kidney disease early so that we can slow progression and optimize the outcomes of patients around the world." "We are seeing globally increasing rates of, again, diabetes and hypertension, the number one and two causes globally. Interestingly, communicable diseases have often been the priority in low- and middle-income countries. Still, we're seeing the rise of noncommunicable diseases such as CKD. I should say one of the other causes of this increasing epidemic is the environmental stressors, particularly heat. So. we see a lot of individuals who are working or living in very hot climates who are developing recurrent episodes of acute kidney injury, which ultimately leads to CKD. So, we have numerous causes for the increasing epidemic of CKD around the globe." #CarnaHealth #ChronicKidneyDisease #CKD #EarlyDetectionCKD Carna.Health Download the transcript here

Karthik Ganesh, CEO at OnMed, is expanding access to healthcare through its CareStation, a self-contained medical pod that allows patients to receive comprehensive primary care services conveniently. The CareStation is designed to be easily deployed and operated in underserved communities, including rural areas, prisons, and foster care facilities. This scalable, hybrid approach provides a personalized examination using medical devices and cameras that allow a remote clinician to prescribe treatment and, if necessary, arrange for further actions. Karthik explains, "The OnMed CareStation gives you the psychological comfort and the confidence of a comprehensive primary care visit. With the rapid scalability and the convenience of telemedicine, it essentially takes the best of both worlds between virtual care and traditional care while also neutralizing the inherent scalability weaknesses and experience weaknesses of both of those. This is why we look at OnMed really as a hybrid care company and the CareStation as a tech-enabled, hybrid care vehicle." "Pretty much every day of the week without a wait, you can just walk in for care. It's cleaner than a doctor's office because, after every single visit, we use UVC lighting to clean out the CareStation. UVC has been known to essentially kill over 99.9% of viruses and bacteria inside of the CareStation. And then, finally, the third thing I would say that makes it unique is it's an extremely personalized experience. There are the reviews we've gotten back from the patients going into the CareStation, where they feel the interpersonal connection with a live clinician. Still, at the same time, they feel it's without any distractions of a doctor's office, people walking outside, the doctor coming in and out, and so on. They feel in that contained space, it's an extremely personalized and intimate conversation with the doctor, exactly as you would expect a highly personal doctor-patient relationship to be." #OnMed #HybridCare #HealthEquity #HealthcareAccess onmed.com Download the transcript here

George Eliades, the CEO of Mythic Therapeutics a company focused on the next generation of antibody-drug conjugates, ADCs, to treat cancer. Their approach aims to expand the population of patients who can benefit from ADCs by targeting proteins expressed at low levels on cancer cells. The company's lead candidate targets the MET protein in non-small cell lung cancer cells and is designed to deliver chemotherapy more selectively and effectively to cancer cells using the FateControl ™ technology. George explains, "We try to be different in two important ways for patients. If you think about ADCs, they've been around for a long time with the promise of bringing chemotherapy-like efficacy, but the safety of a targeted therapy because so much less chemo is being administered to the patient and that chemo is going directly, at least in theory, to the cancer cell. That was sort of the first promise. The second thing that's happened over the years is that the patients who benefit from ADCs tend to be a very small subset of patients, and those are the patients who express a very high level of the target. Generally, it's a protein on the cancer cell that the ADC binds to. And if you don't have a high level of that target expression in general, you don't benefit as much from the ADC." "What we're trying to do is two things. Number one, we're trying to make it so more patients can benefit from ADCs and bring it to the patients who have low expressions of those proteins we're trying to target. And the second thing that we're trying to do is deliver on the initial promise. When I say that, I mean to have a drug that is very tolerable for patients but gives them the tumor shrinkage that the patient wants. Also it lets them stay on the drug without feeling terrible so they can get on with their day." #MythicTherapeutics #ADCs #AntibodyDrugConjugate #FateControl #NSCLC #LungCancer #Oncology mythictx.com Download the transcript here

Karl Ulfers, CEO and Co-Founder of DUOS, helps older adults and their caregivers access government benefits and programs to improve the quality of life and enable aging in place. Working with Medicare Advantage and dual-eligible health plans, DUOS uses a combination of technology, generative AI, and personalized support to help patients navigate the system to apply for and receive state, Federal, and VA benefits and services. The focus is on addressing the social determinants of health and health equity, especially in rural and underserved communities. Karl explains "It's really interesting when you study these individuals that we work with. We tend to get about 15% of a payer's population activated and using our service, which is pretty high. And the people that make up that population, it's quite interesting - 88% of them make less than $28,000 a year. They're, on average, about 74 years old. They tend to skew female versus male and value what we bring to them in terms of helping them tap into these benefits and government programs available to them. They either didn't know about or didn't know how to use them." "We love to say that we are re-imagining the aging experience and to some of the comments where we started our conversation - we believe that we're not just creating a system of aging. We're creating a system of aging that we ourselves are going to inherit. So we're motivated by the direct impact that we can have on the older adults in our lives, as well as the impact that we can have on the system in the future for ourselves." #DUOS #AgeTech #MedicareAdvantage #Medicare #AgingIndependently #PowerofConnections #Healthcare #SDOH #VABenefits #FederalBenefits getduos.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Ed Glynn, Chief Clinical Officer at RhythmX AI, is bridging the gap between real-world clinical data and the use of artificial intelligence. One of the key problems RhythmX is trying to solve is the cognitive burden on primary care clinicians to understand all relevant details about each patient. Using the RhythmX platform, an AI-enabled intelligent assistant sits alongside the doctor to summarize patient information, track progress, and provide recommendations to help provide more holistic, patient-centered care. Ed explains, "Our vision is to really pioneer hyper-personalized care. We do this by enabling clinicians, specialists, and care teams to deliver the right care, at the right time for the right patient and the right channel. We do this through a very clear focus on marrying both real-world clinicians- clinicians who are out there on the front lines and see patients - with deep artificial intelligence experience. And we have a number of years in many different engineers in the background taking care of this. We believe that the synergy of these two aspects, real-world clinicians with deep artificial intelligence experience, is much greater than the sum of the two. And that's the spirit we're approaching primary care with this new tool." "As a starting clinical officer here at RhythmX AI, I see my focus as bringing together those two worlds: the real world, the clinical world, and this artificial intelligence world. It's bridging the gap between the two of those and assuring that the two of these aspects, clinicians and artificial intelligence expertise, can sit down and decide what are the prioritized problems that are facing primary care clinicians today? How do we approach that and bring safe, trustworthy artificial intelligence as an intelligent assistant to these clinicians on the front lines? Ultimately, through this process, we champion patient safety and quality here at RhythmX AI." #RhythmXAI #PrimaryCare #HealthAI #Healthcare #PatientCentric #ClinicianBurnout #CognitiveBurnout #PrecisionCare rhythmx.ai Download the transcript here

Marina Bigsby, Chief Customer Experience Officer at AccessOne, focuses on providing financial products and services to help make healthcare more affordable for patients and improve the physicians' revenue cycle management. The aim is to provide more transparency and payment options upfront to avoid situations where patients forgo needed care. Using AccessOne's technology and mobile payment solution, providers collect payments faster and proactively identify and address operational inefficiencies and staffing challenges. Marina explains, "We're a technology company. We partner with our providers and look at their various situations. Their situation might be that they have a pocket of their population with high debt problems, or maybe there is a staff shortage or some other operational efficiency challenge. We're designing a product that works for them. Our platform is highly configurable, and we built something that works for them and helps them collect more so they can allocate funds to wherever they need. We have a proprietary funding option, so they can work with us to accelerate cash quickly into their RCM or manage risk differently. So that's really what we're doing. We're working with them to collect more so they can help more patients." "It's a time savings so that they get cash faster, which is always good, but it's also a time savings from an operational savings. So responses are great -- we send out a text and our MobilePay product is a replacement, a complete replacement of a piece of paper. Awareness of the text helps people say that even if they don't want to pay through the text, they know there's a bill and know it earlier than they normally would have, so they can pay it however they'd like. Whether in a portal or through our text, that awareness is increased. There are lots of glowing reviews around that product." #AccessOne #RevenueCycleManagement #RCM #PatientExperience #PatientFinancing #PatientAccess accessonepay.com Download the transcript here

Aaron Patzer, Founder and CEO of Vital, focuses on the stress on patients and clinicians created in urgent care, emergency rooms, and hospitals. The Vital platform provides real-time updates and plain-language explanations for patients on their mobile devices. Managing expectations for wait times, connecting to electronic health records, and providing discharge instructions increases patient satisfaction, reduces the burden on doctors and nurses, and causes and addresses staff turnover. Aaron explains, "Everything is done on your mobile phone. You step into a hospital, whether it's urgent care or an emergency visit, or if you're admitted to stay overnight, it's called an inpatient stay. You'll get a text message. So it'll say, welcome to Children's of Los Angeles. Do you want to see what your wait times are? To understand your test results, click here. All you have to do is click this special link, like an airline record locator or password reset link. It can only be used by you. It's secure and brings up a mobile web application that is just a personalized webpage for you. Just like an Airbnb, a Facebook, or something personal to you." "The other thing we let patients do is ask them throughout their visit how things are going. Is it one star or five stars? If they say, you know what, it's been a four or five-star visit, we'll say, great, do you want to tell your nurse that you appreciate them?" "I was worried. I thought it was going to be mostly negative. It turns out that it's about 15% one- and two-star negative comments and 85% positive. And most nurses don't get compliments. They're in one of the most high-stress jobs you can have. They're often verbally or even physically assaulted. They're assaulted more than police officers. There've been a bunch of articles on this. It's crazy what happens in hospitals and emergency rooms. A steady stream of compliments has made all the difference in their quality of life." #VitalAI #AIinHealth #HealthcareTransparency #VitalPatientExperience #HealthTech #PatientEmpowerment vital.io Download the transcript here

Haitham Ayad, CEO of SPIMA Therapeutics, has developed a global licensing agreement for its lead peptide-based immunotherapy candidate, which targets the Myddosome complex involved in inflammation. This approach aims to target undruggable protein-protein interactions, leveraging the advantages of peptides over small molecules and antibodies. In addition to inflammatory diseases like acute pancreatitis, SPIMA is also exploring the potential in certain cancers with mutations in the Myddosome complex. Haitham explains, "In fact, what happened is that the four scientific co-founders worked together for long years to develop and to bring them to the clinical phase and to secure a global patent for that. So, at one point, the technology transfer office of the university, which is called SATT, decided that it was the appropriate moment to create a spin on the company so that the company could continue the work and take the lead candidate further to the clinical phase. And I joined at that point as a co-founder and CEO, immediately after the legal creation and incorporation of SPIMA, we signed a global licensing agreement with SATT to secure the rights of the lead candidate globally. At the same time, we were accepted in the incubator of the University, which is called the TTM factory. So we're happy to continue working with that set and the university to progress the lead toward the clinical phase." "It's known that more than 80% of drug targets consist of interactions between proteins, which take place inside the cells. So this is a big challenge for drugs because small molecules, small chemical molecules that can go inside the cells, are not very specific enough to inhibit this interaction between two big proteins. On the other hand, large molecules like antibodies have good specificity to inhibit such interaction, but they are too large to go inside the cells. This is the sweet spot of SPIMA Therapeutics because the peptides have the advantage of each category. They have very good cell penetration and good stability. So, it's allowed them to go inside the cell, and at the same time, they have enough specificity to block this interaction between the two proteins. This is where we choose our target, the Myddosome complex, which is the interaction between several proteins involved in the inflammation process." #SPIMATherapeutics #Peptide #Immunotherapies #Cancer #Oncology #StapledPeptides #Inflammation #Immunology #DrugDiscovery #DrugDevelopment #AggresiveCancers #PeptideTherapies spima-therapeutics.com Download the transcript here