Empowered Patient Podcast

Richard Mackey is the Chief Technology Officer at CCS, a company that provides chronic care management services focusing on diabetes. CCS uses machine learning and generative AI to analyze patient data from continuous glucose monitors and patient interactions to predict potential issues and proactively provide personalized information and support. CCS works with the patient's healthcare provider to support the prescribed care plan, improve adherence to care plans, and improve outcomes. Richard explains, "On the machine learning side, we have a tremendous amount of data and information about how our patients will understand the devices they might be using. For example, continuous glucose monitors or CGMs are an important standard of care that we work with a lot of patients across the US to equip them, find the right device, help them begin using that device, and best understand what it can do and how it can help them make better decisions to manage their conditions." "We might talk to the patient once or twice a month. We might be talking to them multiple times within a quarter. In some cases, we're interacting with a patient more often than others in the ecosystem, maybe more often than even their physician in terms of the number of interactions per month or period, even their provider, their health insurance provider, as an example. So all that interaction helps give us information and data to take insights on what those patients might need, what's most important to them, how they interact with us. We also can work with a variety of other sources to bring information together. And by using the machine learning tools that we've developed, we can understand things that are important to them. So, it might be around the product or specific information related to the plan or the payer they're working with." #CCSmed #Diabete #CGM #ChronicCare #HealthAI #AI CCSmed.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Raza Bokhari, Executive Chairman and CEO of Medicus Pharma, has developed a novel, non-invasive treatment for basal cell carcinoma, the most common form of skin cancer. This cost-effective transdermal Skinject patch delivers a chemotherapeutic agent applied in a clinician's office over three sessions to remove the lesion, potentially avoiding the need for Mohs surgery, the current standard of care. Medicus is incorporating AI and advanced imaging techniques in its clinical trials to improve diagnosis and monitoring of the treatment's effectiveness. Raza explains, "The gold standard to treat basal cell carcinoma of the skin is surgical intervention, generally speaking, all solid tumors to eliminate cancer if it is caught in the early stage. The treatment regimen is that you surgically take the malignant cells out. The same is true for basal cell carcinoma of the skin. It is a slow-growing cancer. It appears on areas of the body that are exposed to ultraviolet radiation, which is being exposed primarily to the sun. When the lesion appears and is diagnosed, the treatment available is what is called Mohs surgical procedure, which is a micrographic go around the lesion of the cancer and just curate out the cancer cells in a surgical suite done by an experienced surgeon." "We are trying to disrupt by delivering a known chemotherapeutic agent through these uniquely designed, cellulose-based microneedle arrays, which can penetrate the dermis and deliver a chemotherapeutic agent at the site of the lesion and kill the cancer cells, thereby eliminating the need of surgical intervention." "It is currently in clinical trial, but post-approval, it is ready to commercialize. We hope that the dermatologists who are also trained to do Mohs surgery before scheduling the surgery, which usually takes about six to eight weeks to schedule, can also invite the patients to, in an office setting, take our patch and have it placed over the site of the lesion for 30 minutes over three settings. So if a cancer is diagnosed today, you schedule Mohs surgery, which is considered the gold standard six to eight weeks out because that is the wait time. The average wait time in the United States is about six to eight weeks. You could provide an option to have these three sittings one week apart of 30 minutes of our patch and come back for an examination on week four or five. If the lesion has been cured and the skin has become clear, then there is no need for surgical intervention. If, for some reason, our treatment fails, the patient can go on and get more surgery done and eventually become cancer-free." #MedicusPharma #PatchCure #BasalCellPatch #PatchTherapy #BCC #BasalCellCarcinoma #SkinCancer #Biotech #Dermatology #ClinicalTrials #Phase2Trial #SkinCancerTreatment medicuspharma.com Download the transcript here

Scott Xiao, Co-Founder and CEO of Luminopia is developing a virtual reality-based treatment for amblyopia, also known as Lazy Eye in children. A traditional treatment is eye patching, which children find difficult to comply with. The Luminopia approach allows children to use a VR headset to watch content licensed from Sesame Street and Nickelodeon as a treatment to improve visual acuity by modifying the content presented to each eye. This FDA-approved VR-based medical treatment is an immersive environment that reduces distraction and enhances engagement so that children are more likely to comply with and complete treatment plans. Scott explains, "We're pioneering a new class of treatments for a variety of visual conditions, and we're starting with a condition called amblyopia, which is more commonly known as Lazy Eye. And it's the number one cause of vision loss in children. And despite that, there hasn't been innovation in this space for a long time. Traditional treatment for amblyopia requires patients to wear glasses and then, in most cases, go through patching, which is exactly what it sounds like. You take an eye patch and stick it on your stronger eye for multiple hours daily." "The product that we've developed, we like to say, allows patients to watch their favorite TV show as a treatment instead of having to wear a patch. The way that it works is that it's a virtual reality-based product. The kids put on a kid-friendly headset and can choose from more than 3,000 episodes of content that we've licensed from partners like Sesame Street and Nickelodeon. Once the child has chosen a video to watch, we modify how the images are presented to each eye with the goal of rebalancing the input to the brain and getting the brain to use both eyes together properly. We've shown that we can get significant vision improvement just by having patients watch TV for an hour per day." "Certainly compliance is much easier with our product, and that's an important driver of outcomes. So we think that alone is an important advantage over what you could get with patching. The other important thing we've seen in our studies is that we can improve vision even in patients who have been through patching and failed patching. And that's a pretty big chunk of patients. Anywhere from 50% to close to 80% of patients that go through patching are still left with some amount of amblyopia. We've shown that our treatment works even in those patients, and we think it's because we're taking a different mechanism to treat the condition." #Luminopia #Amblyopia #LazyEye #Healthtech #VRMED luminopia.com Download the transcript here

Shaun Rothwell is Chairman and CEO of EVOQ Nano, a company focused on developing antimicrobial technology to combat healthcare-associated infections. EVOQ nanotechnology involves a unique non-ionic silver nanoparticle that can effectively kill even the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria. These nanoparticles can be incorporated into medical devices to prevent bacteria from colonizing and causing infections. The bacteria can not form resistance to the nanoparticles, making hospitals safer for patients and healthcare workers. Shaun explains, "We're surrounded by bacteria all day, every day. When compromised, when we're compromised from an immune perspective, those infections take hold and cause some serious damage in addition to acquired healthcare-associated infections. We understand that paying attention to the issues of the healthcare system today also involves antimicrobial resistance. These bugs are hiding and present everywhere around us. The antibiotic solutions available today are becoming less and less effective over time because these bugs are developing resistance against them. So we have a two-pronged approach to addressing this around AMR, antimicrobial resistance, and impacting healthcare-associated infections. "At EVOQ Nano, we have created and patented very unique nanoparticles. We can make these nanoparticles out of a variety of different platforms, but we're focused on silver right now. One of our challenges when we first introduced it was that silver was commonly known to emit ions. And the reason that it's effective against bacteria is because of that ion emission. And those ions lyse the cell wall and destroy the bacteria even with these silver chlorides. They've been heavily used with coatings and different applications on catheters and different devices. The same reason it's had some effect is also why it's dangerous and toxic at high levels with this ion emission." "The EVQ 218 asset that we have is perfectly spherical, non-ionic silver, a completely new form of silver that has never been created before. And we've been successful in creating this. We have been able to go through a variety of studies at the Seattle Children's Institute with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation's help to prove efficacy. When we were first tested, we were successful in killing 64 isolates from the six most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria known to man, as recognized by the World Health Organization." #EVOQNano #HospitalAssociatedInfections #HAI #NanoParticles #SuperBugs #Catheters evoqnano.com Download the transcript here

Manish Arora, the CEO and Co-Founder of LinusBio, is developing technologies to measure and analyze the exposome which reveals lifelong exposure to environmental factors. Their platform measures molecular signatures in hair samples for early detection and diagnosis of conditions such as autism, where traditional observational methods can be limited. LinusBio is also exploring the use of the platform for other neurological conditions like ADHD and ALS and gaining a better understanding of the role of environmental exposures in the development of diseases. The company has received Breakthrough Designation from the FDA for its autism biomarker to bring this technology to patients. Manish explains, "Our genes are static. So if I were to measure your genes when you were a child, or measure them today, I would get the same answer pretty much. Whereas your exposome changes all the time and so does your body's reaction to it. Let me give you a very simple example. A cup of espresso in the morning has a very different reaction to you than a cup of espresso at 9:00 PM at night, which will keep you awake. So even the same environmental input can have a very different reaction within a day." "So the technical challenge is this: how do we map something that is constantly dynamic? It's always changing in time, and unfortunately, medicine is set with these snapshot technologies. Can that snapshot really give us enough information on what is happening to me? How am I reacting to that environment over the entire year since my last blood test? And that is the big technological challenge facing us as we enter into this arena of exposomes." "The way we're measuring the exposome is that we've developed a technology where we can map exposures and our response at almost an hourly interval. You get all this data in a few moments in more detail. Using that single strand, we get enough information that would take you a thousand blood tests. There's this massive volume of data. To put a number on it, we just recently generated 50 million data points for each patient in our study. Not all of that signal is easy to decipher. So what we do is we put many, many controls, quality controls in there to say anything below this we do not trust. And these controls have been set in place through years of good scientific practice." "So, going back to the technology to very briefly describe, we open up a strand of hair, and then we start looking inside it using lasers and these detectors that we call mass spectrometers, which can measure thousands of molecular features. So that is what we are measuring. We are measuring molecules in your body." #LinusBio #Exposome #Biomarkers #Autism #AutismSpectrumDisorder #AutismBiomarker #ADHD #ALS #Metabolism #MedTech linusbio.com Download the transcript here

Shailu Verma, CEO and Co-Founder of Mila Health is addressing missed appointments and no-shows for appointments to improve patient outcomes, drive staff efficiency, and reduce clinician stress. The Mila platform aims to automate time-consuming tasks, allowing staff to manage their schedules and patient flow better. This AI-powered assistant drives patient engagement by reminding about appointments, checking on medication adherence, and helping address social determinants of health that may be barriers to care. Shailu explains, "These are conditions where a patient has to manage many of these elements that I just talked about. And because the conditions don’t have low equity, as we would call it, patients tend to have a relatively high no-show rate. If you look at chronic, which is almost 50% of the spend in healthcare, the no-show rates where patients aren’t able to keep up with their care plans is anywhere between 36% to 45% in some cases." "There are these external variables around a healthcare plan. I call them externalities. They’re all elements that create no-show rates and barriers for us to complete the care journey. And there are answers to these barriers. There are many hospital systems that provide help to address these barriers, but they’re not communicated at the right time. The individuals who are trying to get to that healthcare don’t quite know it. And that’s where solutions like Mila come in -- Mila is automating many of these guidance mechanisms to ensure compliance to a care plan." "Today, a health system would send a postcard, or they may have a call center sort of an operation, call these 10,000 patients, or send a scripted text message. Scripted text messages work reasonably well for a reminder system, but they don’t really work quite well for communicating with you why an annual wellness visit is important and that you need to come in. So what the platform does is you can give it a goal, such as set up an annual wellness visit or set up or prepare these patients for a colonoscopy. Mila autonomously communicates with the patient either on the phone or by text in a very personalized, engaging, empathetic manner like a human being would, reminding them of their meds, checking on their meds, their symptoms, their diets, and autonomously completing a particular task or getting them ready." #AIPoweredAssistant #CareGap #CarePlan #ChronicConditions #HealthcareTech #MedicationAdherence #NoShowRates #PatientCareGap #PatientCareJourney #PatientOutcome #Readmissions #StaffBurnout #SocialDeterminantsofHealth #SDOH #ValueBasedCare #VBC milahealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Joseph Dayan is a board-certified plastic and reconstructive surgeon at the Institute for Lymphatic Surgery and Innovation, a division of the Institute for Advanced Reconstruction. Doctors have traditionally focused on treating cancer rather than long-term effects such as lymphedema, a swelling condition caused by dysfunction of the lymphatic system. New surgical techniques such as lymph node transplants and lymphovenous bypasses can help reconstruct the lymphatic system and reduce lymphedema symptoms. Joseph explains, "Lymphedema is swelling, usually most often in the arms or legs, that’s permanent and often gets worse over time caused by dysfunction of your lymphatic system. The lymphatic system is basically the sewage system of the body. It clears out fluid waste from your body’s tissues and channels that waste into your lymph nodes, which are part of your immune system that has billions of immune cells that kill bacteria and purify that waste. That fluid then goes back into your veins and back in the bloodstream. When that’s not functioning, that fluid can get backed up, causing swelling in all parts of the body, but also infection, sometimes even life-threatening infections. It is currently incurable, and generally, it gets worse over time, as chronic diseases tend to do." "There are some types of chemotherapy that do cause problems with the lymphatic system, the taxane therapies like Cytoxan, but most commonly for patients undergoing removal of their lymph nodes, the removing of the lymph nodes or radiation to the lymph nodes or both are the most common cause of cancer-related lymphedemas." "I think there are two reasons. Historically, lymphedema was not something typically seen by a doctor or treated by an MD. It’s a disease typically sent to a physical therapist or occupational therapist specializing in lymphedema therapy without being able to offer treatment. I think doctors focus on those things that they can help with. And so one part I think in the MD’s mind is that there’s not a whole lot you can do for it. The other part is at the time of the cancer diagnosis, understandably, the cancer is number one, two, and three priorities, and the consequences of cancer treatment fall a distance second." #Lymphedema #Cancer #LymphedemaAwareness #BreastReconstruction #LymphovenousBypass #LymphNodeTransplant #LymphaticSurgery #LymphedemaTreatmentAct #GLP1 advancedreconstruction.com/lymphedema Download the transcript here

Dr. Tom Coughlin, Founder and CEO of OncRef, has developed a platform that provides oncologists with a single source of information to keep up with the rapidly evolving field of cancer research and therapies. OncRef is addressing oncologists' information overload and time constraints, as well as curating and structuring the vast amount of available cancer data. The company recognizes the potential for AI and data-driven tools to advance cancer care while acknowledging the challenges of developing hallucination-proof AI models for use in the medical field. Tom explains, "OncRef is looking to create a single source of truth for oncologists to keep up with the field of cancer. Cancer is now progressing so quickly with more personalized medicine. And now, with AI, more research publications are being published than ever, making it extremely hard to stay on top of this field. So, we're making it very easy by providing oncologists and oncology professionals with a single source of truth, all curated, and giving them exactly what they need rather than having them drink through the firehose of data out there because it's too much right now. So we're taking that pain out of it." "The data is organized in a cancer-specific way. So, categorized by specific cancers and by having a consistent user interface and interaction, we just add the data to our interface so that the user can see what's changing over time. They do not have to wonder where the data is or be uncertain if they are getting lost in that information or perhaps missing what's happening on that constantly moving and progressing leading edge of cancer research." "We rely on a lot of government data and published information. This government data is sometimes very disorganized and unstructured. So, we have a robust team of data engineers that can structure the data and apply some categorization and labeling using our medical team, which curates the data so we can provide some structure to it to present it on our platform. That's really what we're most excited about. By structuring all of this unstructured data, we're setting the stage for a future Large Language Model or system that we can have less likelihood of hallucination. So, by having structured curated data, we will move towards something more reliable and give oncology an AI they can trust." #OncRef #CancerResearch #Cancer #Oncology #HeathTech #MedAI oncref.com Download the transcript here

Bradley Bostic, CEO of hc1, uses advanced data science, AI, and natural language processing to identify optimal patient testing, better predict disease development, and provide insights that can help prevent disease progression. The use of lab data is crucial for making diagnostic decisions, yet the potential of leveraging data is not being realized. Using technology to address issues like over-utilization of testing and data silos that prevent clinicians from seeing the complete story, hc1 is building a diagnostic insight network that unifies the provider and pharmacists to improve the patient journey and improve outcomes. Bradley explains, "We are transforming laboratories into strategic assets that improve patient care and boost the bottom line for healthcare systems. And really, the way that I came about this was having been in the healthcare industry for quite a while, most of my career, I started seeing this common fact that data was important. The largest component of the data that was used to make diagnostic decisions and diagnose patients was lab data. It's like 80% of all diagnostic decisions at least are informed by lab data. Yet, of everybody I saw out there looking to leverage data, there wasn't anybody that I saw who was hyper-specialized in how you can leverage signals from lab data to make patients healthier. I decided there was a void in the market and that we could be the best in the world. So that's what we've been working on here at hc1." "What we've been able to do is use these advanced data science capabilities, use artificial intelligence, use natural language understanding to not only be able to identify the optimal testing for patients at any given time to get to the best diagnosis faster. But also to become predictive - to identify those people in that constellation of signals who, for example, are trending toward developing chronic kidney disease or those people who are trending toward developing diabetes or any number of different disease states. We have created an artificial intelligence model that can identify individuals who are highly predisposed to developing cognitive decline well into the future without any sort of a specialized test, but just using routine test values all analyzed in this constellation." #hc1 #HealthTechLeaders #LabData #HealthTech #HealthcareAI #HealthAI #FutureOfHealthcare #HealthcareTech #LabDiagnostics #HealthcareAnalytics hc1.com Download the transcript here

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