Empowered Patient Podcast

Chelsey Lindner, a pharmacist and Manager of Clinical Services at Shields Health Solutions, provides insights about the growing prevalence of oral and subcutaneous injection oncology medications, which is shifting the delivery of care from the clinic to at-home. This innovation in cancer care introduces complexities around accessing and affording these specialty drugs and requires the skills of a specialty pharmacy to support the patients and providers. In an integrated care model, there is also a growing need for attention to medication adherence and monitoring for side effects by these pharmacists. Chelsey explains, "Shields is considered a specialty pharmacy integrator. We partner with health systems across the country to help them operate best-in-class specialty pharmacy programs. We are focused on improving patient outcomes through specialized pharmacy services and supporting the optimized use of specialty medications through navigation of access, care coordination, and comprehensive medication management. So those are three of the big services Shields offers as a company." "I would say that the number one component that these oral oncology medications offer is a level of patient convenience and maintenance of their quality of life. Because what was a cancer diagnosis 20 years ago meant they were going to have to come to the health center or be admitted to the hospital to receive their treatment. Whereas now, when a patient might be faced with a certain cancer diagnosis, they will be managing it like a chronic condition. They can stay at home, they can stay with their families. They can do all of those things that they want to do that help support that quality of life as they're going through active cancer treatment. And so with that certainly comes, I think, a level of popularity. And I think the pharmaceutical companies certainly would be incentivized to continue the research in this area and the development of these agents." #ShieldsHealthSolutions #IntegratedCareModel #SpecialtyPharmacy #CancerTreatment #MedicationAdherence shieldshealthsolutions.com Download the transcript here

Tamsin Chislett, CEO of Hyfe, highlights the importance of understanding coughs for healthcare providers, the lack of information about coughs, and Hyfe's advancements in building a database and developing biomarkers based on different kinds of coughs. Hyfe's AI technology, which can integrate with other devices and platforms for remote patient monitoring, enables passive, continuous tracking of cough patterns that can be used in research and clinical trials. Opportunities for digital therapeutics include chronic cough, COPD, lung cancer, respiratory infections, and cardiovascular diseases. Tamsin elaborates, "Hyfe is the global leader in AI power. The problem we're trying to solve is that you have this really common symptom cough, which has been experienced by every human alive and is experienced daily by many people, yet to discuss it, measure it, monitor it, or even manage it, we're entirely reliant on subjective data. Everyone's had the experience of going into a primary care doctor, and saying I've got a really bad cough. The doctor says How bad is it, and is it getting worse? We don't even have the proper language to describe it." "We want to get to the point where, in those situations, the doctor can start to get objective data about the patient's cough patterns and use that instead. The way we see it is that there was a time when to measure fever, we put a hand on a patient's forehead. We hope that within a few years, thanks to Hyfe's technology, we should not be in the same position with cough. So we're always looking to have objective data." "I think the interesting thing about cough is that because it's never been measurable, it hasn't been studied anywhere near as much as it probably should have. And even in the first five years of Hyfe's life, we've seen an explosion in cough-related science now that it's possible to monitor coughs with a smartphone, a smart watch, or anything with a microphone running Hyfe's technology. We've seen exciting science across a whole range, many of which are intuitive when you start thinking about cough, acute cough is a big one and respiratory infections, but there's also chronic cough." "There's also COPD, there's IPF, there's lung cancer, there are so many respiratory and even cardiology diseases where cough is a cardinal symptom, a really clear sign of exacerbation of disease or worsening. However, to date, it has not been able to be measured, and cough monitoring with Hyfe allows you to monitor cough over time, see patterns, and use those patterns to optimize patient care in the future." #HyfeAI #ChronicCough #HyfeDTx #DigitalHealth #AIinHealthcare #DigitalTherapeutics #MedAI #CoughMonitoring #RemotePatientMonitoring #HealthInnovation #RespiratoryAwareness #CoughAwareness #CoughScience #PatientCentricCare hyfe.com Download the transcript here

Geoff Nau, Senior Manager of Product Management for Paragon at Altera Digital Health, highlights how digital health solutions can address the challenges of nurse burnout and retention. AI and machine learning can help automate documentation tasks and streamline workflows to allow nurses better access to patient information. Improving nurse retention requires attention to factors like time-off policies and leveraging technology to give nurses more time to focus on patient care. Geoff elaborates, "I have been a nurse since 2004. I practiced at the bedside for approximately 15 years. I did pediatric and adult ER as well as NICU. So I started my nursing career on paper and transitioned to electronic. And so in that time, a couple of factors, in the beginning, there was not enough information, and click-intensive. And looking at my travels and going to hospitals and sites today, that challenge is still there as far as access to data relevant to that patient visit, whether it's trending labs, care plans, etc. My experience with most EHRs out there, most of all, is that it’s just click-intensive. A one-size-fits-all is tough to do nowadays." "There is still a considerable amount of paper out there. When you start getting into these specialized areas like behavioral health, IOP or intensive outpatient, a lot of that, especially if there's anything like a treatment plan, things that may have multiple people needing to touch it, I still see a lot of that on paper. My goal from a solutions perspective is to get as much of that electronic as possible, especially given where we're at with challenges with nursing and staffing. Today, your patient loads go from four to five to one nurse." "I'm a nurse. I also have a doctorate in organizational psychology. And this was a big study of my focus during my dissertation, where I looked at why people stay on the job as opposed to why they leave. When I first got into nursing, nurses would leave for a dollar. They would go up the street to another facility. But now, having support systems in place allows nurses to take time off, as you said. I know that here, where I live in North Carolina, a couple of institutions are taking a look at their PTO policies. They're looking at their holiday policies and trying to be more flexible. They're working with PRN staffing. In my research, I also found a community component to job embeddedness, if you will, in nursing." #AlteraDigitalHealth #DigitalHealth #Nurses #Nursing #NurseBurnout #NurseRetention #MedAI alterahealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Paul Moore, Chief Scientific Officer at Zymeworks, focuses on developing targeted therapies, particularly multispecific antibodies and antibody-drug conjugates for hard-to-treat cancers such as gynecological, thoracic, and digestive tract cancers. This approach can target multiple areas on tumor cells and immune cells, potentially overcoming tumor heterogeneity and allowing for immune system modulation. The platform allows for a plug-and-play approach, enabling the development of therapies for oncology and autoimmune diseases. Paul explains, "So, multispecific antibodies are antibodies. Antibodies traditionally have a single target that they bind, so they're monoclonal and hit a specific target. A lot of excitement is generated for bispecific antibodies, which are engineered to bind two targets. Then with multispecifics, you are trying to broaden even further the number of targets or binding sites you've incorporated into your drug so that you can simultaneously interact with more than one target. The reason that can be important is that allows and facilitates new biology that is not possible for just a monoclonal antibody or a single antibody-targeting drug conjugate." "Multispecifics open up the opportunity to take two targets that are on different cells, different cell populations. So, you can have a target on a tumor cell you're trying to target. Then you can have a target on an immune cell like a T cell, which you can co-engage. You can bridge a T cell to a binding domain that's on a multispecific with your second specificity, which can bind to the cell. And what that allows you to do is bring the T cell into the environment of the tumor cell, and through that engagement, the T cell can kill the tumor cell. So that is the foundation of a lot of excitement in bispecifics." #Zymeworks #Antibodies #MultispecificAntibodies #ADC #AntibodyDrugConjugate #Tumors #Cancer #ImmuneSystem zymeworks.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Sonja Tarrago, head of Physician Strategy and Engagement at DexCare, has created a care orchestration platform to help health systems improve patient access to care, direct patients to the proper care, and optimize provider capacity. DexCare solutions have enabled health systems to treat more patients with existing resources, increase new patient acquisition, and reduce time to care. This platform reduces long wait times, provides real-time online scheduling, and matches patient demand with provider availability. Sonja explains, "DexCare is a care orchestration platform used by leading health systems to help manage the supply and demand of healthcare. That means that our platform helps health systems get discovered at the point of search. So, where patients are searching for care, we know that's typically Google, and then we navigate patients to the best fit care. So we do that while optimizing provider capacity and resources in real time. So, as we talk about our customers, we think that first of all, we need to acknowledge that healthcare is in crisis right now." "In addition to making care more discoverable, we're using data to help direct our patients to the right care based on what they're looking for. This makes sure that the patients are getting connected to the right resources within the health systems that we work with, and we're helping to reduce bottlenecks and improve efficiencies within the health system." "So we need to help patients find care, not find a doctor. In addition to that, I think another gap is that patients have limited access to real-time online scheduling. And by that, I don't mean a form that a patient fills out and waits for someone to get back to them. I mean a real-time slot that patients can book into." #DexCare #CareOrchestration #DigitalHealth #CareOptimization dexcare.com Download the transcript here

David Norris, Founder and CEO of Affineon Health Inc., recognizes the significant problem of provider burnout, which is primarily caused by the time doctors spend on administrative tasks rather than with the patient. Affineon's AI-powered solution aims to address this by automating the review of the provider's inbox and reducing their cognitive load. The inboxes are filled with lab results, pharmacy messages, and other tasks that need review. This approach enables doctors to focus on the required actions quickly. David explains, "We're attacking one of the biggest problems providers often complain about: the inbox. And this is their clinical inbox, not their email inbox like you and I have. The clinical inbox is typically filled with hundreds of things that come in daily. For a PCP, this can often include things like lab results. So you go to your doctor for your annual wellness visit, and they order five to 10 different labs, which come into their inbox the next day. If you're seeing 20 patients a day, that's hundreds of results, plus you're getting prescription renewal requests from the pharmacies, you're getting patient messages. The provider, while trying to stay focused on seeing 20 patients a day and keeping their focus on those patients, they're now literally trying to squeeze a little inbox time in before and after patients." "Affineon has introduced an AI inbox that integrates directly into the electronic health record system. We do exactly what you would do if you hired an assistant in the medical terminology, triage your inbox, which is to handle everything they can handle. The provider focuses on the most critical things. So we're using an AI agent to do that, and unlike a human, which would be very costly to do this, our solution costs $2.50 a day. So about half a cup of coffee. So, for a provider to now have the ability to have an assistant triage their inbox every day and to help them by reducing their daily inbox volume by up to 50%-60%, that's pretty incredible. And before AI, that wasn't possible." #Affineon #MedAI #ProviderBurnout #AIInbox affineon.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Jason Williams, President and Director of Interventional Oncology and Immunotherapy at the Williams Cancer Institute, uses a combination of Pulse Electric Field technology to ablate tumors and direct injection of immunotherapy drugs into the tumor to stimulate the immune system. This approach can be used in conjunction with traditional cancer treatments and has fewer side effects than standard immunotherapy. This method is part of the broader trend in cancer research to provide a more targeted approach to treating tumors. Jason explains, "Our big focus is going to the tumor itself, so we do treatments directly at the tumor, and we do a combination of things. We do things that will be considered ablation where we're using different technologies or energies — I'll explain — particularly, we use one called Pulse Electric Field (PEF), which kills the tumor by essentially shocking it, and that kills it in a way that actually makes the immune system see it better. You're not trying to kill all of the tumor, you're trying to kill pieces for the immune system. Then we inject drugs into that area of the tumor, particularly immunotherapy drugs, but it can be other drugs as well, and just really taking the fight to the cancer right in the tumor." "I think that our mistake in cancer treatments is that we're not addressing the tumors directly. I mean, it's one thing to expect that you're going to take a drug orally or intravenously and that it's going to arrive and make it to the cancer cells. Still, the other way is to go right into it, putting the drugs there, and particularly with immunotherapies, where you want to attract the immune system to it. You want those drugs in the cancer, you don't want them just everywhere in the body." #WilliamsCancer #Cancer #Oncology #Tumors #Immunotherapy #PulseElectricField #ImmuneSystem #TargetingTumors WilliamsCancerInstitute.com Download the transcript here

Joel Stanley is the CEO of Ajna Biosciences, a company developing the next generation of botanical medicines. These full-spectrum drugs, derived from plants and fungi, are regulated and approved through the FDA, unlike dietary supplements. Lead drug candidates are targeting autism, generalized anxiety disorder, and PTSD. With expertise in cultivating and scaling the production of botanical raw materials, Ajna is creating a sustainable model compared to wild-harvested botanicals. Joel explains, "It's no secret that before about a hundred years ago, all of our medicines were botanical medicines, or mostly coming from plants, or maybe mushrooms. And in the last century, as we developed Western medicine - modern medicine - the drug approval process started to learn how to synthesize molecules and isolate molecules from nature. So we started to step completely away from plant medicine and into a synthetic pharmaceutical landscape. The FDA fairly recently started allowing botanical drugs. So what that means is that it's full-spectrum medicines coming from the given root, shrub, leaf, flower, or mushroom. Those would be botanical drugs. So botanical drugs are not single-compound botanically derived drugs, which make up about 20% of our pharmaceuticals. They're a full-spectrum plant extract, a botanical drug from a regulatory standpoint." "So, plant-based therapeutics can mean dietary supplements that do not go through clinical trials. They're not legally prescribed by doctors and generally not covered by insurance. Whereas botanical drugs go through the FDA drug approval process, rigorous clinical trials against placebo control to become FDA approved, covered by insurance, and legally prescribable. So that's really what sets what we're doing, creating botanical drugs, apart from what people have considered plant medicine this last century." "Our most advanced drug in our pipeline is called AJA001, and it's very special to me because I've been basically working on this drug for more than 15 years. It's made in partnership with my previous company. I was the first CEO of a company called Charlotte's Web, which was really the first, and it's still the largest CBD brand out there. It was everything we learned at Charlotte's Web that kind of prompted me to start Ajna BioSciences four years ago. And that first drug is made from full-spectrum hemp, so it is CBD dominant, and it does have other cannabinoids, such as THC, as well as other minor cannabinoids. It also has certain terpenes." #AjnaBiosciences #BotanicalMedicine #PlantBasedTherapeutics #PharmaInnovation #DrugDevelopment #NaturalMedicine #BioTech ajnabiosciences.com Download the transcript here

Dana Brown serves as President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board at iCAD Inc., which has developed a next-generation approach that leverages advancements in AI and imaging technology to improve the accuracy and efficiency of breast cancer screening. This technology can help reduce unnecessary biopsies and additional tests while more accurately identifying cancers that need immediate attention. The concerning trend of rising breast cancer in younger women highlights the importance of early detection and personalized care plans. Dana explains, "Literally, iCAD's first FDA-cleared product in a first-generation AI was around 2002. So it's been well over 20 years. We're now on our fourth generation. So, yes, you're very accurate in describing this as a next-generation approach. So, not only has imaging technology improved over the past 20 years, but artificial intelligence has also improved. We continue to leverage the latest in artificial intelligence technology, how the artificial intelligence can be trained and learn, and a broad base of researchers that help us develop the solution. So you have new minds, new ways to think about solving the problem, and new technology that can be used to solve the problem. Then, there is a new underlying screening technology that gets better and better at clearer imaging." "The American Cancer Society reports that if we can catch a breast cancer very early in stage one, then the likelihood of, I'll say surviving breast cancer is 99%, so very, very high. So the earlier we can catch a breast cancer, the less invasive and costly and length of time the treatments can be. There are more options for those patients as well as the likelihood of a positive outcome, being able to again, have no further evidence of the disease is increased." #iCAD #BreastCancer #BreastCancerScreening #Radiology #CancerDetection #BreastBiopsies #Mammogram #WomensHealth #MedAI icadmed.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Rany Aburashed, CEO and Founder of Neurogen Biomarking, is using a blood-based biomarker looking at p-tau 217 to detect early signs of Alzheimer's disease, up to 8-10 years before the onset of clinical symptoms. The company has built an ecosystem to provide patients with a comprehensive health assessment with an at-home blood test, cognitive testing, access to neurologists, and education on lifestyle changes that can support a good quality of life. Their mission is to take a proactive rather than the current reactive approach to diagnosing and slowing the progression of cognitive decline. Rany explains, "The challenge for us, and this is what I saw from years of clinical practice and hospital management, is that a disease like Alzheimer's operates almost like a green light. Life is okay, you're having minor issues, but for the most part, you're moving along. Then suddenly you notice a sentinel event, which then becomes that red light, and now you have Alzheimer's dementia. And so the issue that is at the core of Alzheimer's is early detection. Is there a way for us to detect things earlier and, in turn, provide patients with an opportunity to take control of their dementia and make the necessary changes in treatments?" "In the current setting, the way that we do it in the United States and around the world is really reactive and it is too late by the time your mother or father is developing cognitive complaints. It's very easy to ignore the early stages of it because you can function for three to five years without really anything dramatic happening. So suddenly, when that dramatic instance occurs, for example, you leave the stove on, or you get lost driving back to your house, something that's very obviously outside of the normal, that might trigger you to say, "Let's get Mom checked." "At launch, our focus is on using the biomarker called p-tau 217. This biomarker can be detected now with more technologies in the blood at microscopic levels, and we couldn't do that effectively 10 or 15 years ago. That science has caught up, and the technology has caught up to a point that now, even 8 to 10 years before any significant clinical symptoms occur, we're able to detect if this protein is elevated. Now, if this protein is elevated, depending on the assay that we use, it's about 93%-97% sensitive for potentially developing Alzheimer's long-term. So it's a good protein to use as a triage protein." #NeurogenBiomarkings #Biomarkers #BloodBiomarkers #Alzheimers #AlzheimersDisease #CognitiveDecline #Dementia #EarlyDetection #Neurologists NeurogenBiomarking.com Download the transcript here

Ram Krishnan, CEO of Valant, uses AI to make mental health care more accessible through their practice management and patient engagement platforms designed specifically for mental health providers. AI is applied to improve administrative efficiency, address billing and compliance, and drive successful patient outcomes. New solutions are needed due to the growing patient population for mental health services and the potential of advanced therapeutics that are transforming the behavioral health environment, where demand is outpacing the supply of mental health care providers. Ram explains, "If I took a step back, AI - let's describe what AI is across a practice. Multiple functional verticals exist within a practice, including marketing. A team is trying to acquire the right type of patients. There's your administrative vertical, if you will, which is just making sure you're running the business well. You have your clinical vertical, which is the time the clinician, prescriber, psychiatrist, and practitioner spend with the patient. There's billing, making sure you're getting paid for all this work, and there's compliance along the way. And each of these verticals has the potential to have an increased efficiency, first and foremost, by AI. Secondly, behind it are improved outcomes." "Yes, I think we are getting into a wild realm of possibilities for our application of AI. I think what we are making in our systems is a cautious and practical, pragmatic approach of working our way through the functions that I laid out, and then the goals in terms of efficiency. I think there is a wide range of potential here with AI. When people think of AI in mental health, they immediately think of an AI avatar of some kind that you can converse with and becomes a replacement for the therapist and a replacement for the understanding and awareness of everything. From the words you're choosing to the changes in your vocal modulation to the facial expressions on your face. Putting that all through the analytics to come back and assess risk of things like you said, suicide ideation or violence, potential violence. I think those are much later-term applications. There has to be a purpose behind that." #Valant #BehavioralHealth #MentalHealth #PatientEngagement #PracticeManagement valant.io Download the transcript here

Jaya Tiwari, Senior Vice President of Clinical and Regulatory Affairs at XVIVO, which is focused on improving organ preservation for transplantation. Current organ preservation methods using ice coolers limit the time and distance organs can be transported. XVIVO's perfusion technology can significantly extend the preservation time of hearts, kidneys, livers, and lungs, providing hospitals and transplant centers access to more viable organs. The company is passionate about increasing organ availability to give more patients access to life-saving transplants. Jaya explains, "I take it back to 1967 when the first heart transplant was performed in Cape Town, and the way that the heart was preserved and transported in essentially an ice box. The standard of care for the preservation of organs is still an ice or an ice cooler with ice. So, this decreases metabolic activities. So, to try to preserve the organs so that you can get them from the donor to the recipient, the problem is that the organs are not viable for a very long time, and they start to degrade very quickly. That really limits the amount of time that the organs can be on ice, transported from the donor to the recipient hospital. Because of that logistical complexity, a lot of organs are ultimately not transplanted." "There have been some preclinical studies that we've done that have shown viability of the heart tissue for up to 24 hours. But what I think is probably the most remarkable example that we've seen is that the universities in Paris have put together something called an investigator-initiated study, where they actually were able to transport a donor heart from the French West Indies to Paris for transplant. That was about 12 hours that the heart was in transport and using the device. So that's remarkable because that essentially tripled the standard preservation time for hearts. Now, in the US, we have a clinical trial where we're currently seeking approval from the FDA that it's safe and effective to use this device for up to 12 hours." #XVIVO #HealthcareInnovation #LifeSavingTechnology #PatientOutcomes #OrganTransplantation #OrganTransplants xvivogroup.com Download the transcript here

Brian Drozdowicz, Senior VP and General Manager for Acute and Payer at PointClickCare, provides a platform using predictive analytics and AI for data sharing and collaboration across healthcare stakeholders. Interoperability has been an ongoing challenge due to the lack of standards and clear governance to support data sharing. The shift to value-based care drives the need for more access to patient data to improve patient outcomes, facilitate care transitions, and reduce readmissions and costs. Brian explains, "PointClickCare has been a player in the market for quite some time. We're best known for the market-leading senior care EHR that we've had in market for 20-plus years. I run a business unit that sits by the side of that. We refer to that as the acute and payer business. And ultimately, this additional business and value proposition to the market operates the largest care collaboration network, sharing healthcare data across all the different stakeholders, hospitals, health plans, ambulatory clinics, community providers, and connecting is our core business. So we're ultimately in the business of sharing data and doing that safely, securely in a trusted way." "There are a lot of ways of driving adoption and sharing data at scale. I'd call out a couple of key areas in which we've seen a lot of progress in recent years. First is having well-established technology standards that safely and securely transmit that data. Number Two is having to share that data. So, otherwise, it's a bunch of data flowing back and forth just for the sake of data. And that doesn't solve anything with value-based care. Putting a set of guardrails in place requires providers and payers to work together with this data." #PointClickCare #HealthcareData #Interoperability #MedAI #DataSilos #ValueBasedCare #VBC pointclickcare.com Download the transcript here

G.T. LaBorde, CEO and Co-Founder of IllumiCare, focuses on reducing hospital clinical waste. Doctors often make decisions about tests, medications, and procedures without knowing the actual cost to the hospital and the patient. The IllumiCare platform aims to nudge doctors to make cost-effective decisions without compromising the quality of patient care by providing cost information and clinical guidance at the point of care. Another benefit is the reduction in overtesting and overprescribing, supporting efforts to improve patient safety.. G.T. explains, "When doctors make decisions about what test to order and what medications to prescribe, particularly in the inpatient setting, they have no idea what the cost is. They don't know the relative cost of one drug or another, and it's not a knock on doctors. It's very difficult to know because there are, in our average hospital across hundreds of hospitals, something like 2,000 different medications on the formulary that are available to order if you're a provider." "We self-impose a limit, on average, taking only 60 seconds of a provider's attention a day. We calculate when we nudge somebody, when we present something in their workflow, how much time is it on the screen? And it comes down to 60 seconds a day of attention that we take. So we take great pride in how much technology we use to figure out when not to say something or not. We try to figure out the person most likely to take action, and is this information germane to this person for this patient, such that there's a high probability they'll take action? And we measure how frequently people take the action we recommend, and it's several times higher than similar alerts within the electronic medical record." #IllumiCare #ValueBasedCare #VBC #HealthcareInnovation #ClinicalDecisionSupport #HealthIT #HospitalIT #EHR illumicare.com Download the transcript here

Gary Falcetano, Scientific Affairs Manager for Allergy at Thermo Fisher Scientific, is a leader in allergy and autoimmune diagnostics, providing specific IgE tests and the instruments to run them. Accurately diagnosing allergies can be challenging, but specific IgE testing can help confirm the underlying causes by looking at individual allergen components for precise diagnosis. This is the first step in determining the appropriate management approach to potentially interrupt the atopic march, where allergies can progress or even be life-threatening. Gary explains, "It runs the gamut of just about anything that could potentially be an allergy disease. So I think the majority of our testing is done in both environmental allergies and food allergies. What people think about when we, especially this time of year in the US, with spring about to become a big onslaught, are environmental allergies, including pollens, grass, trees, and weeds. Also, looking at some of the indoor triggers to environmental allergies like dust mites, pets, molds, and mice is pretty key when assessing for respiratory-type symptoms. On the food side, any of a number of foods can potentially cause a patient to produce specific IgE, which is the sensitization that allows us to become allergic." "We all think of respiratory allergies as straightforward, but there's an overlap of symptoms, especially from non-allergic causes, that can cause similar symptoms. So when thinking about respiratory allergies, we think about nasal congestion, post-nasal drip, and cough. Those symptoms can all be certainly caused by allergies, but they also can be caused by non-allergic triggers. That's one of the places where diagnostic allergy testing or specific IgE testing comes in to confirm whether we're dealing with an allergy. Then, if it's an allergy, what specifically is driving the symptoms? Once we rule out allergy, we can go down a whole other diagnostic pathway for all the various causes, like non-allergic rhinitis." #ThermoFisherScientific #Allergies #AllergyTesting #ClinicalDiagnostics #PatientCare #IgETesting thermofisher.com Download the transcript here

Chia-Lin Simmons, CEO of LogicMark, is developing technology solutions to help seniors age independently and safely. Their AgeTech ecosystem addresses the requirements and comfort levels of the diverse aging population and provides predictive technology to identify potential health issues and emergencies. The key is keeping a human-centric approach to the application of this technology and integration with other health monitoring devices and apps. Chia-Lin explains, "At LogicMark, we tell people that the medical react technology business is saying that our job is to make better technology to help identify that fall or a catastrophe or a health issue, and then help as we can within that golden hour in a medical emergency. When I joined the company in June of 2021, our goal was not just to be even better at reactive technology but to develop predictive technology, which is to take a look at the pattern of living and your experiences and being able to stop that first initial catastrophe or fall if we can. And that's where our interest and a lot of our IT development have been focused on." "Our job as technology providers to caretakers and those they love is not that we're meant to be technology that is helicoptering over, for example, your parents. Our job is to provide a safety net. And I think that visual, to give you a sense of what we think is important, at the end of the day, your parents are not your children. They want to live independently and live the life that they want to live fully as grown adults. And so our job is to provide them with the capability to be independent and safe, as well as the safety and privacy they want as grown adults. And so, how does that translate? At the center of everything we do, we call compassionate technology or human-centric technology." #LogicMark #AgeTech #HealthTech #MedTech #ElderCare #AgingInPlace #SeniorSafety #Innovation #FutureOfHealth #HealthcareInnovation #ConnectedHealth logicmark.com Download the transcript here

Martin Brenner, CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of iBio, is focused on the untapped potential of therapeutic antibodies for obesity and cardiometabolic diseases. Leveraging AI and machine learning, iBio is streamlining the antibody discovery and optimization process and addressing the need for more complex antibody mechanisms of action. Their lead candidate, iBio 600, is an anti-myostatin antibody designed to address the side effects of muscle mass and bone density loss associated with current GLP-1 therapies. Martin explains, "We can separate this into multiple areas. First of all, there's a predictive model that suggests that there are 5,000 different targets related to disease out there. So, there are 5,000 different possibilities to make medicines. All of the currently approved antibodies target only 92 targets. Even worse, 40% of approved antibodies only target about 10. So you can imagine there's a huge untapped potential of novel targets for which antibodies could be used. The problem is that the technologies must keep up with this to open that novel target space. That is problem number one." "So, as you know, AI has gotten a little bit of a bad reputation over the last few years, and there was a huge hype about this, and I want to be very clear about this. It takes more than 10,000 steps to make a medicine. At iBio, we enable three of these steps with generative AI. So, that does not make us an AI company. That does not make our molecules AI drugs. What it does is it actually makes it possible for us to create medicines that we couldn't do before. So, the way we use AI at iBio is multiplefold. First, we start our discovery process with the epitope steering engine. You have to imagine that drug targets are massive proteins, and only very small regions on these proteins have a biological function. So you want to get your antibody exactly to those regions that cause a biological function." #iBio #DrugDiscovery #MedAI #Obesity #GLP1 #CardioMetabolicDiseases #Antibodies #AntibodyTherapies #Myostatin iBioinc.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Lauren Parks Nicola, Chief Medical Officer at RevealDx, has extensive experience dealing with the challenges of accurately describing lung nodules and distinguishing between benign and malignant nodules based on visual inspection of CT scans. RevealDx software tool integrates into the radiologists' workflow and uses advanced algorithms and a large database of lung nodule data to provide a malignancy score for lung nodules. This technology can help reduce unnecessary follow-up scans and invasive procedures for patients with benign lung nodules while identifying high-risk ones requiring more aggressive investigation. Lauren explains, "Reveal's product is a software that characterizes lung nodules. So lung nodules, little blips on a lung that we find on a chest CT. And the thing is, they're very, very common. Lots of patients have them, they can turn out to be cancer, most of them aren't. But with the knowledge that we have right now, just as radiologists looking at those nodules, it's really hard to tell which ones are going to turn out to be cancerous and which ones aren't." "The software tool characterizes which nodules are more likely to be malignant and might need faster diagnosis, more aggressive workup, biopsy, some interventions, things that can help us diagnose cancer earlier when it's easier, less expensive, and much better for the patient to treat versus the ones that don't need that kind of care. And for a lot of patients, that means not needing follow-up scans, not needing biopsies, and not needing invasive treatments to prevent something that would never have been a problem for them in the first place. So it is that added information, as well as added clinical information, gives us and the patients tools to better predict how these are going to behave." #RevealDx #RadiologyAI #MedicalImaging #Radiology #LungCancer #DigitalHealth #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #AIinHealthcare #MedicalAI reveal-dx.com Download the transcript here

Daniel Getts, the CEO and Founder of Myeloid Therapeutics is focused on the role of myeloid cells in the immune response to solid tumors. These cells are the first responders in the immune system and play a crucial role in bridging the innate and adaptive immune response. The Myeloid Therapeutics' mRNA technology activates myeloid cells in tumors, making the tumor microenvironment hot and attracting other immune cells to fight the cancer. Daniel explains, "The ability to harness our immune systems has revolutionized how we treat cancer. Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go, and if you think about some of the worst of the worst cancers, such as pancreatic cancer, liver cancer, and so on, immunotherapy has still not gotten us to a place where we can solve this. It's our mission at Myeloid Therapeutics to overcome these challenges. We've uncovered a lot of really interesting things about these cancers in the last 20 years, and we've been harnessing that knowledge." "Myeloid cells are at the heart of the immune system. They're the first responders. So, if you have an infection or bump your knee, these cells are immediately called to the site to wall off and prevent any more damage. However, they also serve as the bridge to adaptive immunity, the T cells and the B cells, which are also important for integrating an immune response. In the context of COVID vaccines, we talk about antibodies and T cells, it's the myeloid cells that are essential. In the context of what we've been learning, immunotherapy, up until recently, had been very focused on T cells and how to short-circuit the whole system just by using or activating those cells to kill cancer. And what we're starting to learn is to harness the full capability of our own immune systems, you've got to go back to the start. You've got to harness the myeloid compartment so you can orchestrate all immune elements to kill cancer." #MyeloidTherapeutics #MyeloidCells #ImmuneSystem #SolidTumors #Cancer #ImmuneResponse #Oncology #TumorMicroenvironment myeloidtx.com Download the transcript here

Saul Marquez, Founder and CEO of Outcomes Rocket, emphasizes the need for strategic healthcare communications, including earned media and paid advertising, content creation, and social influencers. The explosion of social media and online news outlets has changed the healthcare information environment, challenging companies to express authentic and intentional messages to their target audience. Identifying pain points and unique propositions is key to effective healthcare messaging that persuades, motivates, and informs. Saul elaborates, "I started the Outcomes Rocket agency as a podcast, and then it evolved into a full-service agency focused on healthcare organizations, leaders, and brands looking to maximize their impact in the market and accelerate their growth. We work in four areas: strategy, earned, owned, and paid. So, under each of those categories, there are different focus areas." "It's never been more important for leaders to be authentic in an age of artificial intelligence and just so much noise. Authenticity cuts through that noise. And when I say authenticity, it's important for brands as well as leaders to be true to who they are, and it's important that the message be well-crafted and intentional. So, if you're being authentic on the fly or on the whim, that's not very strategic. You want to make sure that under the strategy and the work you do to put your messaging out there, that everything ties back to why you do what you do. How is it different? Whether you're an individual influencer or a brand, what is the promise?" #OutcomesRocket #HealthcareInnovation #DigitalMarketing #HealthTech #HealthcareCommunications OutcomesRocket.health Download the transcript here