Empowered Patient Podcast

Michael Palladino, VP of Sales and Clinical Solutions at OptimizeRx, is utilizing AI to educate patients and providers, promoting shared decision-making about which medications are most likely to yield the best health outcomes. The goal is to combat information overload by precisely targeting education to specific patients and delivering that information on the patient's preferred media delivery platform.  Technology-driven nudges deliver timely information, reminders about upcoming appointments, and address medication adherence issues.  Michael explains, "So OptimizeRx is a health technology company. We partner with the life sciences industry, and we help patients get on the right drug at the right time, educating both patient and provider. And we do that through some traditional methods of point-of-care. We also use our AI technology, which we will talk a little bit about today." "We've evolved as a company to be as individualized as possible, and that really has been using the technological advances of AI and machine learning over the past three years to predict in a patient journey when they may qualify for a procedure or drug, and educating both the patient and the HCP. So, it's really the use of data and technology that has evolved, and it's how we're leveraging our expertise in the space." "Traditionally, the way that a pharmaceutical industry may work or a life science manufacturer may work is they're often quite siloed. The patient gets some type of education on TV, the HCP somewhere in the country gets a similar type of education, and there's not a lot of synergy. What we have done in the marketplace is combine the patient's finding with the HCP's finding, and we educate them at the right time."  #OptimizeRx #PrecisionMedicine #HealthTech #AI #HealthAI #DrugInformation optimizerx.com Download the transcript here

Jim LaRoe, CEO of Symphion, highlights an often overlooked cybersecurity threat posed by network-connected printers in a hospital setting.  Modern printers are complex devices with numerous features that create vulnerabilities and potential access points to patient and hospital data for cybercriminals, yet they are generally managed outside of the IT security environment. The first step in ensuring printer security is to determine the number of printing devices on the network, their locations, and their configurations. Additionally, it is essential to ask the IT team to demonstrate security hygiene for the entire printer fleet. Jim explains, "We personally were exposed to the print industry in about 2015. And we noticed that the printers are really essential for patient care. They process, store, and transmit the most sensitive data, but they have grown up outside of the information security and supply chain. The security has been left vulnerable. In today's cybercrime growth industry climate, where opportunistic criminals are looking for opportunities to steal data, ransom, or attack patient care, you've got a real recipe for disaster. So really, we're facing a whole lot of issues that relate to the vulnerability of the printer." "They're absolutely very complex business machines, and the manufacturers for the last 40 years or so, from what you're talking about, the analog days, have really enriched them with incredible features beyond the camera, the document sorter, and things like that. They built in incredible web server features, email servers, fax servers, FTP servers, like a Dropbox that we all use for heavy payload communication protocols. They built all those features into the devices, and they built in ways to secure those features, but they haven't been used, and they're not being used on networks."  #Symphion #Hospitals #PrinterSecurity #Cybercrimes #NetworkSecurity symphion.com Download the transcript here

Sinan Gölhan, Founder and CEO of GelTech, describes the characteristics and applications for hydrogels, which are bio-friendly, super-absorbent materials similar to natural tissue. In cancer treatments, hydrogels offer a way to deliver chemotherapy drugs directly to a tumor, which can significantly increase the accuracy and efficacy of the drug. GelTech has developed a robotic instrument to streamline the time-consuming testing process for new hydrogel treatments, automating repetitive actions, reducing inconsistencies, and enabling 24/7 testing capabilities. Sinan explains, "You could think of hydrogels like sponges. They're super absorbent, bio-friendly materials that are made of water. For this reason, scientists like myself essentially consider them the next best thing to natural tissue. Just like our own bodies, they're mostly made up of water. They have great applications in drug delivery, implant cosmetics, all these modern hydrogel face masks, and other types of substances." "I worked in hydrogel research for many years after seeing my mother and both my grandmothers go through chemotherapy treatments. I became motivated to make these treatments more effective, smarter, more targeted, and hydrogel-like. I just realized the main limitation is that to even make one of these treatments, it costs the company around a billion dollars over 10 years to figure out if this hydrogel is even going to work. And most of this was due to manual testing. It's scientists doing the same tests over and over again. It's very tedious, takes a long time, and it's very expensive to get a scientist to do this all day, every day. After feeling like a robot during the same test over and over again, I said, ‘I want to build a robot that automates this.' The company I was working for loved it and I essentially started focusing on that for the rest of my career."  #GelTech #Hydrogels #Robots #ResearchRobotics #Cancer #CancerTreatments geltechlabs.com Download the transcript here

Elizabeth Jeffords, CEO and President of Iolyx Therapeutics, discusses dry eye disease and its connection to autoimmune conditions. The company's novel therapeutic topical immune modulator is designed to treat the root inflammation in the eye, which systemic drugs often fail to reach due to the blood-retina barrier. Patients with dry eye disease often have multiple comorbidities and are excluded from clinical trials, making this research even more significant in finding treatments for a growing population. Elizabeth explains, "Some people have physical dry eye, i.e., they have a dysfunction in their meibomian glands, and they can't make enough tears or those tears aren't the right composition. But more than half of the patients with dry eye have an underlying autoimmune disease. And they might know that, and they might not. So, patients with either Sjogren's disease or any of the thyroid conditions, patients with rheumatoid arthritis, MS, connective tissue dysfunction, most of those patients have some ocular comorbidities, and specifically, dry eye is probably one of the biggest ones." "Sometimes we treat the body, and we can treat autoimmune diseases successfully, but you don't really get most drugs into the eye. And so those alarm bells are still going off in the eye. And unfortunately, these patients with autoimmune disease tend to have more severe disease. They respond differently to the drugs that are out there today and probably most troublesome to us, and why Iolyx is really targeted these patients is that they get excluded from most of trials because they're just more difficult to treat, but they're also more difficult to treat because they have systemic medications that they're on, and most of those drugs get excluded." #IolyxTherapeutics #DryEyeDisease #Ophthalmology #AutoimmuneDisease #EyeCare #ImmunoOphthalmology #ClinicalTrials Iolyx.com Download the transcript here

Gene Mack, CEO and President of Gain Therapeutics, is combining AI-powered drug discovery with the development of allosteric modulators, drugs that bind to unique sites on proteins. The company's AI platform, Magellan, is crucial for accelerating drug discovery by reducing the time for computational screening of potential drug compounds.  Their lead compound is showing promising results as a potential disease-modifying therapy for Parkinson's disease, aiming to halt the progression of the disease rather than just treating symptoms. Gene explains, "So allosteric modulators of protein, it's a bit of a word salad, but what we're trying to achieve here is finding unique binding sites on proteins that are sort of away from the active site of that protein." "So, a lot of physics calculations go into these binding site calculations. The idea is to complete these quickly during the screening of hundreds or thousands of compounds. This process takes 10 to 15 minutes to run a set of computations and determine if a particular molecule is a fit for a specific protein. If that takes 10 or 15 minutes per compound, it's not a very big deal to go to that library if you need to get through billions, trillions of those compounds, and you need that computational speed to really fire up." "We are able to speed up those calculations from, let's say, 10 minutes to milliseconds. You can screen through much larger numbers of compounds and potentially even construct new molecules that are not known to the public domain, which would be a real key innovation." "What we think we have in our lead program, which is GT-02287, another molecule that was discovered through our application of Magellan. What we hope we have in GT-02287 is a disease-modifying approach to Parkinson's. Up until now, the only available treatments for Parkinson's are really just focused on the symptoms and allaying the severity of the symptoms." #Parkinsons #ParkinsonsDisease #AI #DrugDiscovery #GAINtherapeutics #DiseaseModification gaintherapeutics.com Download the transcript here

Paul Howe, COO of Protega Pharmaceuticals, is focused on how abuse-deterrent technology can address the opioid crisis and the need for mandates for insurance coverage of safer abuse-deterrent formulations. The SentryBond technology was specifically designed for immediate-release opioids to make it difficult to manipulate pills for abuse via crushing, inhaling, or injecting. Protega partnered with software company Opus to offer a program that helps educate chronic pain patients, manage their treatment, and provides physicians with risk stratification data to improve care and reduce the likelihood of abuse. Paul explains, "Most importantly from our standpoint is to protect from the risk of misuse, abuse, and diversion, which is escalation from orally taking medications to crushing, inhaling, injecting, or smoking. Unfortunately, when that escalation happens, many times patients end up on illicit fentanyl and heroin through the black market. So what we're trying to do is stop that escalation through our abuse deterrent technology and our medication. It's called SentryBond abuse deterrent technology, the company's Protega Pharmaceuticals."   "We also have a software program that we're now offering to physicians that deal and work with a lot of patients with chronic pain that really helps patients with chronic pain understand how to treat their pain and also titrate down off medications when possible, or at least get on the lowest possible dose and try multimodal care, try other types of avenues of procedures, different things they can do to help with their chronic pain." #ProtegaPharmaceuticals #PainManagement #ChronicPain #OpioidAbuse #OpioidPolicy #AbuseDeterrent. protegapharma.com Download the transcript here

Dr. George Magrath, CEO of Opus Genetics, discusses the company's experience in obtaining non-dilutive funding for its ultra-rare inherited retinal disease program. He highlights the challenges and advantages of this funding source, as well as the importance of establishing relationships with patient advocacy groups and foundations to mitigate risk and increase their attractiveness to traditional investors. The drive for non-dilutive funding for ultra-rare diseases is expected to become increasingly important in helping to get drugs to clinical trials. George explains, "Opus Genetics is a gene therapy company for eye disorders that occur in children. And these disorders are ultra-rare. It's 200 patients, a thousand patients per indication, and it's really good science. It's from Gene Bennett, who was the inventor of Luxturna, which was the first approved genetic medicine. And it does require some non-conventional thought on the financing, though, because these are so rare. And what we've done at Opus Genetics and have been really fortunate to be a part of is non-diluted funding from external sources. And that comes in the form of partnerships with patient families and organizations, like we just announced last week with RDH 12 Alliance." " It also comes with the Foundation Fighting Blindness, which has given us a number of grants and non-dilutive funding deals. And so those have been really important to Opus and have really helped us progress the programs. The way we think about that is the first principle is the clinical data we typically generate using our equity dollars. The preclinical work we try to do with non-dilutive funding, and that way we're able to focus on spending in rare scenarios." #OpusGenetics #RareDiseases #UltraRareDiseases #EyeDiseases #GeneTherapy #NonDilutiveFunding #Blindness #Ophthalmology opusgtx.com Download the transcript here

Lindsay Mateo is the Chief Commercial Officer at Weave. This company has developed a platform to automate and streamline the regulatory documentation process for FDA submission for pharmaceutical and biotech companies.  The regulatory lifecycle for drug development currently involves data from various sources in digital and paper formats. Weave Bio's tools are designed to automate and streamline administrative aspects of the regulatory process and create a living digital record of the development of the drug, which supports collaboration and saves time. Lindsay explains, "I look at the regulatory life cycle for any given drug program, and experts are at the core of that. Those experts, who are scientists, strategists, and project managers, essentially put all the work into the documentation that goes to regulators like the FDA here in the US. And that information goes on to allow this drug to continue through various stages of development to ultimately get to market and obviously help patients." "That is everything from early studies looking at how drugs are being handled in animals, in mice and rats, all the way through to clinical development. We start to get into humans and then again out through what gets drugs to market and even post-market expansion of various labels. So this is critical to getting any therapy to any patient with any condition. The process itself, the challenge with the process is that it's manual."  #Weave #WeaveBio #Pharma #Biopharma #WeavePlatform #AINative #AutoCT #AutoND #FDASubmission #RegulatoryDocumentation Weave.bio Download the transcript here  

Aspen Noonan, CEO of Elevate Holistics, a company that helps patients obtain medical marijuana cards through a telehealth consultation with licensed doctors. The qualifications for obtaining a medical marijuana card vary by state, and Elevate Holistics helps patients navigate the regulatory landscape. Many doctors are hesitant to recommend cannabis due to the federal illegality and restrictions from employers, and Elevate Holistics is filling the gaps by connecting patients looking for alternative treatments for conditions such as anxiety, depression, PTSD, and chronic pain. Aspen explains, "We are a one-stop shop for getting your online medical marijuana card. We connect doctors with patients 100% online in over 18 states to go through the process, which basically means book your appointment, fill out forms, join a video chat, call, and check for your emails because it's a hands-off experience. We really help people. I say A to Z, we don't just see you and get out. We ensure that your state application is filed correctly, so you ca your medical card at the end of the day."   "You have every right to ask your primary care provider for a medical marijuana recommendation. The problem is, and the reason we started, is that a lot of doctors do not want to sign their name next to something that says cannabis. They aren't allowed to go through their clinics. Let's say they work at a hospital, they work at a big organization, and they're not allowed to attach their name to the cannabis industry. And so that's where we come in and just take patients, take a provider, put them together."  #ElevateHolistics #Marijuana #Cannabis #MedialMarijuana #MedicalMarijuanaCard elevate-holistics.com Download the transcript here 

Mark Goddard, Vice President of Clinical Services at Infobionic.AI,  describes the remote cardiac monitoring system that provides near real-time monitoring of patients with potential cardiac irregularities.  The benefit of continuous monitoring allows for early detection of arrhythmias like atrial fibrillation, a growing concern driven by an aging population and factors like obesity and high blood pressure. AI-driven algorithms are used to analyze ECG data and identify potential issues, enabling proactive treatment and prevention of complications like stroke.    Mark explains, "The focus of our monitoring system is to provide near real-time monitoring of patients who are reporting maybe cardiac irregularities. The whole idea is to provide that near-real-time access to cardiac information so that arrhythmias can be identified relatively quickly. Additionally, the treatments for those arrhythmias are relatively quick as well, providing better patient outcomes. Just related to the fact that the data is always there, and it comes in maybe a minute or two behind live."   "We are partnered with a major health system that has an AI engine that is basically developing AI tools that can be utilized in cardiac monitors. And just looking at the patient's ECG, they're able to determine the potential for arrhythmias that may not have occurred yet. And that's kind of what we're focusing on. The ability to review ECG and understand those little nuances that may indicate, hey, this patient's going to have an event like atrial fibrillation, which is the most common irregular rhythm there is, especially for an aging population. Identifying those folks early can really help with not only the outcome for the patient, in that they're not going to run into the problems you may have if you don't recognize you have atrial fibrillation, but it'll also decrease healthcare costs, which in the end helps everybody." #InfobionicAI #MedAI #Cardiology #AFib #HeartMonitor #CardiacTracking infobionic.ai Download the transcript here