Empowered Patient Podcast

Akihiro Ko is the CEO and Co-Founder of Elixirgen Therapeutics, which was founded with the mission of treating patients using RNA technology. Their c-srRNA, controllable self-replicating RNA, technology is being applied to telomere biology disorders where patients have inherited short telomeres and a failure to develop bone marrow. Elixirgen is looking to restore the ability to create blood cells in patients suffering from this rare disease. Akihiro explains, "We are harnessing the tremendous potential of our controlled self-replicating RNA technology to redefine stem cell therapies for patients using the ZSCAN4 gene. We are working on potentially groundbreaking treatments for difficult-to-treat, rare, and genetic diseases, starting with the hematopoietic system and then going out into more indications." "And our unique technology is that it is controllable in that it is optimized for expression at 30-35 ℃ and inactivated at temperatures at and above 37 ℃. And what that enables us to do is basically tune the

Rich Parker, MD Chief Medical Officer at Arcadia, is working with large healthcare providers to provide data analytics to address the needs of large populations of patients and very specific groups facing unique challenges. The goal is to get the signal-to-noise ratio correct as quickly as possible to, for example, efficiently develop successful COVID vaccinations and identify which patients need help first in an emergency. More refined stratification of patients is also revealing at-risk patients who may have been missed in earlier analyses of social determinants of health. Rich explains, "So the data comes from so many disparate sources that we need companies like Arcadia that aggregate data to do the work. The data is coming from claims from payers, the data is coming from electronic health records, data is coming from public sources, and data is coming from manufacturers of vaccines. So all that data has to be put together, aggregated, cleaned up, and then made usable for interpreting for clinical trials

Tuvik Beker, CEO of Pangea Biomed, is looking for more accurate biomarkers for oncology to determine better who might benefit from a specific drug. Their ENLIGHT platform is a pan-cancer, pan-treatment response predictor and can be used to find the best patient populations to give a new drug. They are also working with bio-pharma companies on improving the identification of novel targets through better biomarkers, better patient stratification, and combination therapy optimization. Tuvik elaborates, "Rather than looking at the genome and looking for abnormalities in gene coding, those rare fusions, or actionable mutations, what Pangea is doing is looking at the way genes are activated in the tumor." "And this turns out to be a much, much more common abnormality in cancer tumor cells. So almost any tumor cell that you would examine, you would find hundreds and even thousands of genes that are normally encoded. So they have no mutations, they are wild-type genes, and yet they are abnormally expressed in the tum

Dr. Ira Spector is the CEO and Co-Founder of SFA Therapeutics, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company leading the way as a fourth-generation microbiome company to treat inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The first microbiome companies focused on fecal transplants, while the next innovation was probiotics. The third generation took the understanding of the bacteria in the GI microbiome to derive bacteria for each patient. SFA is asking what the bacteria make and their physiological function in order to synthetically make those substances as an effective small molecule drug. Ira explains, "The immune system in the human body is regulated up and down by messengers called cytokines. And long before cytokine storm and COVID came about, we were researching how to control these signals in the body. In particular, what we found is that there are cytokines related to these autoimmune diseases. It turns out that when you do a review across a range of autoimmune diseases, you find the same four or five cytokines

Dr. Jula Inrig is the Chief Medical Officer of Travere Therapeutics and is eager to find innovative treatments for rare kidney diseases, which can be challenging to diagnose and have limited therapeutic options. In clinical trials, their lead candidate, sparsentan, reduces proteinuria significantly in patients with IgA Nephropathy and focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS). Travere is working with the U.S. Preventive Task Force to encourage earlier diagnosis and screening for these often silent diseases. Jula explains, "We've mapped out a path to get therapies approved for trying to avoid really what is one of the most detrimental complications of kidney disease, which is kidney failure, where you essentially wind up on dialysis. This is a treatment option where patients need to go into a clinic and be hooked up to a machine which cleans their blood three times a week. Or the other option is transplantation. One of the things that we have worked on is a molecule called sparsentan to try and avoid kidney fa

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz, CEO of KeyCare Medical, is listening to consumer feedback and helping health systems provide more virtual care options, particularly for routine types of care. At the same time, KeyCare is working with providers on a strategy that enables them to come up with a plan to care for patients with higher complexity that requires them to be seen in the office. The key to success is the systems integration and data sharing that is possible with this virtual care approach. Lyle explains, "I think virtualists and virtual care technology need to be different in various ways from traditional office-based care, in a good way. It needs to focus on a more routine set of problems. It needs to be done in a highly efficient manner to be convenient and less expensive while maintaining quality." "So with KeyCare, we are providing access to a tech-enabled virtual care workforce to health systems, and we're doing it all on Epic. So we have our own instance of Epic that we're staffing with virtualists. We're mai

Dr. Leslie Soiles is the Chief Audiologist at HearingLife, which provides hearing care through professionals who conduct hearing assessments at physical locations and make recommendations for the appropriate way to treat hearing loss. With advancements in nanotechnology and the availability of over-the-counter hearing aids, there are more opportunities to address hearing loss. Still, there are many issues to be aware of when using those devices. Leslie explains, "Over-the-counter hearing aids are designed for people with mild to moderate hearing loss. Over-the-counter hearing aids don't require a hearing test to be performed, so if somebody thinks that they might be a candidate for OTC, over-the-counter hearing aids, I really do recommend that they first start with that hearing test to make sure that their need falls within the standard of what an over-the-counter hearing aid is designed for." "In HearingLife, we recommend people start at age 60, and that provides that baseline measurement. As those statistic

Dr. Sherry McAllister is a practicing chiropractor and President of the Foundation for Chiropractic Progress which recently commissioned a Harris Poll about physical and mental health. One of the most concerning findings was that the link between physical and mental pain was strongest in survey participants 35-44 years old. Geographic location was also a factor, as was the sharp difference in how men and women respond to pain. Treating the mind and the body is essential for good health, and F4CP promotes guidelines that emphasize that non-pharmaceutical options for pain treatment should be the first choice, not the last resort. Sherry explains, "What we learned was that half of the US adults, just about 44%, actually reported that they had experienced physical pain that they believe was worsened due to mental or emotional pain. We now know there's a link between mental health and physical pain. It's been well-established in the healthcare community. Still, the past two years have really broadened the public's

Mehdi Maghsoodnia is the CEO of 1health and is determined to bring advanced diagnostic medical tests to a broader audience to enable more patients to benefit from precision medicine advancements. Too often, patients are put on costly drugs that are not effective. Using data from advanced testing allows clinicians to diagnose conditions more accurately and to determine the best treatment approach. Mehdi elaborates, "Where we focus is really more on how do we make these advanced diagnostic tests cheaper and faster, so we can introduce more accurate, clean data into that care pathway. You want to know very quickly, very accurately, all that you need to know about the specifics of the patient, the specifics of their genetics, and the specifics of the potential tumor type, interaction with drugs, and so on and so forth. Those are the types of information we are trying to deliver into the care decision pathway very quickly." "That data set is building up very rapidly because we've been sequencing patients, and we'v

Anatoly Postilnik, VP of Global Healthcare Consulting at First Line Software, is building software solutions and bringing data management, data analytics, and systems analysis to healthcare organizations. Original EHR systems were implemented to replicate paper flow and siloed data collection. As they move from paper-based to digital data, these organizations need to integrate diverse databases to manage the supply of resources and demand for patient care. Payers and providers also face changes in procedures and behavior to drive down costs and improve efficiency. Anatoly explains, "Clinician burnout is a really big topic. No matter what you start talking about, you end up talking about clinician burnout. Essentially yes, the demand and supply predictability factors into optimizing their workflow, simplifying their workflow, and eventually reducing provider burnout. But it also helps the organization to be more effective, so this is positive from multiple ends of not just people having better lives as practit

Lawrence Margolis is the CEO of PersonalRX, which is changing the model for how pharmacies provide prescriptions and over-the-counter drugs and advice about usage. With a personal care coordinator, PersonalRX provides each patient with a personalized experience that ensures prompt delivery of drugs, reminders to take those medications, and alerts to possible negative drug interactions. Lawrence explains, "We send out a 30-day supply. We send that 30-day supply out ahead of time so that we never want anybody to worry 'where's my medicine?' If they do, then we failed our job, frankly. So we get it there a few days before they're going to need it." "When we package medication, we package them in individual dose packs. Everybody gets packs in a roll that are marked breakfast, lunch, dinner, or time of day, 8:00 AM, 12:00 PM, 5:00 PM, bedtime. So when somebody is looking at their pack, if they see that breakfast is still there at noon, they clearly did not take their medication. So it keeps them on track a whole l

Chris Brickler, CEO and Co-Founder of MyndVR, is looking at VR to disrupt senior living care to promote wellness and engagement. MyndVR has designed lightweight immersive glasses to create a virtual reality experience for seniors, reimagining the traditional VR gaming experience. The MyndVR care tablet drives the glasses and connects to the MyndVR network allowing the senior and caregiver to access one of the largest private catalogs of senior-friendly immersive experiences. In addition to entertainment, the experience has been shown to significantly help achieve a patient's physical, occupational, and speech therapy goals. Chris elaborates, "We've essentially reimagined virtual reality away from all of the hype around the gaming movement, and really leveraging the tools of virtual reality and gamifying different types of therapies as well. So we're going to be disrupting the way therapy is done with seniors, and that's very exciting." "One example is that he was perfectly healthy from a cognitive point of vi

Charlie Noel is the Executive Director at Northwestern Health Sciences University's Institute for Integrative Care, which is working to transform healthcare from a disease-focused model to a holistic approach. The Institute provides practical tools to help healthcare organizations move to an integrative care model while encouraging multidisciplinary groups and community engagement to provide care for the whole person. Charlie explains, "The traditional hierarchy structure of mainstream healthcare limits the input from some professionals. So that means we should also be bringing in some of these other disciplines and also building an environment where we embrace emerging mainstream and complementary healthcare to eliminate the silos in care delivery and enhance outcomes." "The Institute is collaboratively working with organizations and communities to build systems where all people benefit from integrative care. We want to meet people, organizations, and systems where they're at and then be able to develop plan

Dr. Calum Yacoubian, the Director of NLP Healthcare Strategy for IQVIA, is applying clinical natural language processing to take complex, unstructured healthcare data and turn it into structured and searchable information. In a value-based care environment, clinical NLP can augment manual work by nurses, clinical coders, and clinicians to identify relevant, often unstructured information at the right time for specific patients, and payers to undergo chart review for risk adjustment. Calum explains, "Within healthcare, data and information are hugely fragmented. There was a HIMSS report in 2020 that said the average healthcare system in the U.S. has 15 disparate EMR systems it is pulling data from. Going back to your first question, the 360-degree view of a patient is about using as much data as available to understand patients and the populations they exist in. If it's difficult to access and make the most of the data. That's the first and probably one of the biggest barriers that we have in healthcare, this

Angela Fox is Head of Analytics at Bright.md which is an asynchronous telehealth solution bringing an audio-only virtual visit option to providers for them to treat patients with common low-acuity conditions. Staffing challenges, clinician burnout and increasing demand from an aging population are driving the acceptance of creative solutions to provide cost-effective, timely healthcare for patients. Angela explains, "Through a patient's health system portal, they can get online and take a clinical interview. Then they answer several clinical questions about what care they're looking for, what care they're seeking that day. Then that's sent to a provider at their health system in an easy-to-review chart note. So the provider can review the chart note, make a diagnosis, and a treatment plan. This all happens completely within the electronic medical record." "One of the key elements that we also include in our reporting is provider variation. And that kind of information about how productive providers are, which

Matthew Hedberg is the VP General Manager of Professional Services at Semcasting a data-as-a-service company working with health insurers, agents, CCOs, PPOs, hospital networks, and pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers. Carrying a SOC 2 Type II certification, Semcasting is helping clients determine how to use the information they have and enhance that data to incorporate it into a digital program for patient outreach and education of targeted audiences. Matthew explains, "There are significant timelines as well. Even if we are scoped to receive data for a particular project from a particular brand, it may take weeks or months to get the necessary additional approvals to receive certain levels of patient or member information for a particular project. This is just as an additional layer of safety and concern to make sure that patient data is protected and isn't circulating around amongst any players who aren't required to see it." "One of the more specific tactical tools we developed back in 2018 wa

Dr. Tadd Lazarus is the Chief Medical Officer at Pictor, working on innovative diagnostic tests to provide answers to complicated clinical questions concerning the status of a patient's level of antibodies. From one specimen, their test can determine if the antibodies have been produced as a result of vaccinations or boosters and if the patient had the disease being tested for.  Their mission is to help patients determine if they have effective antibody levels and are able to have the kind of response that will be protected them over time. Tadd explains, "We develop innovative diagnostic solutions to enable more informed clinical decisions both in human and animal health. Specifically, we have a highly multiplexed platform that really changes the way antibodies are detected. As we know from COVID, antibodies are proteins that our body manufactures in response to infectious agents, except we detect them differently. We detect antibodies in an incredibly focused and what we call highly multiplexed manner, so th

David Harel is the Co-Founder and CEO of CytoReason, providing researchers and drug developers with a complex database and predictive computational disease models to conduct synthetic clinical trials. Their mission is to integrate all the information available on a specific disease in a particular population to support faster and more efficient drug development. David explains, "Computational disease models are the core technology that we've developed, and it is a method to incorporate all the available information, specifically omics and molecular data, that is available in one disease, in one place, in a way that is useful. But people who have been involved in the molecular data space for a while know that the integration of multiple data types and multiple data sets is very difficult, and it needs to be done in a certain context. The context in which we are incorporating the data is allowing the users to run those synthetic trials on their own or using our teams." "One of the features that we have is the a

Tom Dugan is the President of Integrum, which is transforming the lives of amputees through a unique orthopedic implant that enables them to attach their prosthesis, their prosthetic leg, or any other type of prosthesis, directly to the musculoskeletal system. These bone-anchored prostheses dramatically improve the lives of amputees with the additional benefit of osseoperception, where they can feel the type of surface they are walking on. Tom explains, "What we do is an alternative to the socket. We have a surgical implant, and it's a fixture that is implanted into the canal of the patient's femur. And if you're familiar with dental implants, that's probably a good analogy because the dental implant was founded by a professor in Sweden called Per-Ingvar Brånemark. And Professor Brånemark, back in the '50s, was doing research in rabbits, and he implanted titanium fixtures into the rabbits that had some optical technology so you could see what happens with the bone in terms of healing." "What happened is Profe

Dr. Tram Tran, the Chief Medical Officer at Glympse Bio, is taking the knowledge about the mechanistic roles protease play in many diseases to develop an injectable biosensor to measure protease activity rather than just a one-time measurement of the amount of protein in the blood. The platform uses machine learning to analyze different protease levels and the protease activity over time to come up with a classifier and differentiate between disease activity and not disease activity. Tram explains, "So, a couple of years ago, though, I think recognizing that having an injectable platform and then having the patient urinate and check the urine for the level of protease activity might be a little bit more complicated than what would be ideal in the clinic for the patient. We actually were able to switch over to a blood-based test, where we are able to measure the patient's disease activity via protease activity via a simple blood test. And so, I think that was really a remarkable change over the past couple of