Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Eugene Manley, biomedical scientist turned social impact leader and Founder and CEO of the STEMM & Cancer Health Equity Foundation, is focused on increasing STEMM workforce diversity and improving outcomes for underserved cancer patients. He highlights the lack of diversity in foundational lung cancer research and the need to expand the number of cell lines being included to develop more effective therapies. Eugene also raises concerns about barriers to clinical trial participation and the need to engage local community partners and AI to raise awareness and improve accessibility. Eugene explains, "The SCHEQ Foundation, which is a short name for STEMM and Cancer Health Equity, is tasked with working to increase STEMM workforce diversity and improve outcomes for underserved patients navigating the cancer care continuum. This is done broadly through trying to increase STEMM access and exposure, mentorship and training programs to help students navigate career transitions, and providing information and resources to underserved patients to help them navigate and access the care they're entitled to." "There are many paths into the medical field now. If you're trying to do particularly applied research or do things that directly impact patient outcomes, then yes, you might want to go more of a technical path. But as we mentioned, AI is the new thing on the block. It's a lot of looking at trends, variances, and differences in data, and then you can use that to predict how things may act or behave. However, the downside of this is that the data is often based on one population, one race, or ethnicity, which makes it harder to broadly generalize these results. So that's a lot of the challenges that we're seeing right now." #SCHEQ #HealthEquity #STEMM #CancerResearch #DiversityInScience #BiomedicalResearch #ClinicalTrials #LungCancer #HealthDisparities #MedicalInnovation #SocialImpact #HealthcareAccess #PrecisionMedicine scheq.org Download the transcript here

Ro Wickramasinghe, Vice President and Head of Global Business at Pi Health, identifies fundamental problems plaguing clinical trials, including operational inefficiencies and limited access to trials. Pi Health is addressing these challenges by developing an integrated software platform for clinical trial sponsors, sites, and patients and partnering with community-based cancer treatment centers worldwide. The company has built a hospital in India to serve as a living laboratory to test and refine its model to democratize access and increase the ethnic diversity of trial participants. Ro explains, "I think the challenge has always been, from a pharma-biotech perspective, is to find patients, but, from the other perspective, its patients participating in trials and being able to find clinical trials. So a lot of stats get bandied around, but despite many eligible patients, the percentage of eligible patients who actually end up in a clinical trial is really small. It's like 5% to 8%, so not a huge amount. I think that's kind of one problem." "So we have it in chicken and egg scenario where we as a company develop clinical trial software, but when ultimately the vision for us is for that to really become the standard of care and really make trials more efficient for the clinicians that treat the patients and run the trials for these pharma companies and biotech companies that develop the drugs and sponsor the study." "But having said that, I think to run lots of studies, what we decided to do was to build our own cancer hospital in India. And the beauty of that is that it is fully vertically integrated at the point of care. So the data gets captured on those patients in FICS, which is the software we've developed and then we can run trials. We have run trials for pharma and biotech at that site using our software. So it was, I guess, one of the quicker ways to test the software in a real-world environment and also getting lots of data on FICS and how it can benefit patients from the point of care to being on trials." #PiHealth #ClinicalTrials #HealthTech #CancerResearch #Innovation #DigitalHealth #PharmaTech #PatientAccess #MedTech #Healthcare #ClinicalResearch #GlobalHealth #HealthcareInnovation #India Pihealth.ai Download the transcript here

Paul Goode, President and CEO of Glucotrack, discusses the evolution and future of continuous glucose and continuous blood glucose monitoring for people with diabetes, as well as opportunities for implantable CMG monitors. In addition to convenience and comfort, the Glucotrack implantable CGM monitor is designed to be more accurate and measure blood glucose. This approach eliminates the lag time associated with wearable CGMs that measure interstitial fluid, enabling faster, more effective treatment decisions. Paul explains, "When you look at the market penetration of CGM in the US, even for those who are covered with insurance, because it is a standard of care in a large portion of patients with diabetes, it's still only a little over 50%. And when you try to understand why, it's because the technology works well, it's pretty accurate, and it helps patients. Market research shows that it's a collection of various reasons." "When we realized that a large majority of the problems with use of current CGMs, whether people are using them, or people don't want to use them, a lot of these, let's call them hassle factors or discomfort factors, were because it was a wearable product. So we said, well, let's go inside the body, and that resolves almost all of those types of problems." "Then we said, well, if we're in the body, we can also measure the glucose that's in the blood, actually measure blood glucose. Most folks don't realize that many do, but many don't, that CGM, the wearable CGMs, measure the interstitial fluid and not the actual blood glucose. And typically that's not a problem. There is a time lag between blood glucose and interstitial fluid, with interstitial fluid lagging behind anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes. But that's usually only a problem during rapid rates of change, for example, when one is eating, exercising, or sick. " #Glucotrack #DiabetesTech #MedicalDevices #ContinuousGlucoseMonitoring #HealthcareInnovation #DiabetesManagement #ImplantableTech #BloodGlucose #CGM #MedTech #DiabetesCare #HealthTech glucotrack.com Download the transcript here

Ben Backus, Chief Science Officer, and James Blaha, CEO and Founder of Vivid Vision, discuss their work addressing binocular dysfunctions and improving visual field testing. Their innovative visual test uses a consumer-grade VR headset to deliver a gamified, less stressful, more engaging experience for patients, encouraging longer, more frequent testing. This approach also improves dataset precision and overcomes barriers in clinical trials for new therapeutics for diseases such as glaucoma and macular degeneration, potentially accelerating the development of vision-saving treatments. Ben explains, "Vivid Vision addresses two conditions. One of them is binocular dysfunctions, which include conditions like amblyopia, strabismus, and convergence insufficiency. And the other one that we're really focusing strongly on now is visual field testing, which is especially important to use for monitoring people who have glaucoma. It also gets used for screening tests for glaucoma, and it's an especially important part of getting new therapeutics approved for any medication that is going to try to preserve your sight. That includes macular degeneration, a particular flavor of macular degeneration, degeneration called geographic atrophy, inherited retinal diseases, diabetic retinopathy, and stroke. It's the visual field test that we are putting the majority of our effort into, but we still also treat binocular dysfunction." James elaborates, "I originally got started, I guess, because I grew up with some binocular vision disorders. I had a lazy eye and a crossed eye, also known as strabismus and amblyopia. And I had kind of the traditional experience as a kid where I was not cooperative with the treatments, wearing my eye patch, and doing eye exercises, and that sort of thing. And I wasn't successfully treated as a kid. About 60% of the time, that's the case in the US, where kids are not successfully treated for conditions. Then, when I was older, in my mid-twenties, I got interested in this topic through a TED talk by a neuroscientist, Sue Barry. That ultimately caused me to make the first prototypes, and I was able to gain 3D vision depth perception from some of those first prototypes. And that's ultimately what caused us to start the company." #VividVision #VRHealthcare #EyeHealth #MedicalTechnology #DigitalHealth #VisionTesting #Innovation #Glaucoma #MacularDegeneration #Amblyopia #HealthTech #VirtualReality #PatientCare #EarlyDetection #ClinicalTrials seevividly.com Download the transcript here

Erez Druk, CEO of Freed, was motivated to bring technology to the healthcare environment based on his wife's experience as a family medicine doctor. Freed was founded to alleviate the provider's administrative burdens by leveraging AI to streamline pre-visit preparation, billing, and EHR maintenance. The focus is on small and rural private practices, giving them tools to save time, reduce costs, and maintain their independence. Erez explains, "So the need that I identified, together with my wife Gabi, was that clinicians need more time in their lives. They want to spend less time on this admin work and more time again with their patients and families. And that was it, thinking about how we can use these new technologies and feel better products that really take care of that, help clinicians be happier and freer, hence the name Freed. Yes, super proud now to be supporting more than 25,000 clinicians who will use Freed to do a lot of this work for them. So that's how the need was identified for years of watching the pain, let's say." "But my background is, so I studied mathematics and computer science back in Israel. So I'm originally from Israel. In the Technion, we like to think of Technion as the MIT of Israel. So I studied there as an undergrad, and then I moved to the Bay Area to work for Facebook as an engineer. I was very lucky to start on the same day on the same team with this guy named Andrey, who, 10 years later, after lots of convincing, is my co-founder and CTO. So he is the real technical brain behind what we're doing here. So I worked as an engineer and tech lead at Facebook, and then I started working in my first startup called UrbanLeap." "And with EHR integration- I'm going a bit into the weeds here- but EHR integration is a big problem in healthcare that is mostly unsolved. So, we built an agent, which we call "EHR Push," that goes into the EHR and, like a human, finds the right fields, navigates to the right places, and puts the note and everything in the EHR for the clinician. And it's working amazingly. It saves clinicians a lot of time. And that's another example of how we apply this agentic AI to solve more and more complex problems for the clinician, keep it simple, and just save as much time as we can for clinicians." #FreedAI #AIscribes #HealthcareAI #ClinicianBurnout #HealthTech #AIinHealthcare #HealthcareAI #MedicalDocumentation #HealthcareInnovation #DigitalHealth #PhysicianWellness #HealthcareEfficiency #MedTech GetFreed.AI Download the transcript here

Mary Kelly Jagim, principal consultant at CenTrak, describes the role and benefits of real-time location services (RTLS) and how indoor GPS can improve facility management, patient safety, and staff morale. The use of RTLS in the development of smart hospitals helps mitigate staff burnout by reducing time-wasting tasks, such as searching for equipment, and by providing safety features like badge access and tracking. This technology is also being used to enhance the human touch in the clinical setting by providing more accurate, real-time patient location information and updates to clinical staff and family members. Mary explains, "So, let's say we're talking about a medium to large hospital with lots of people in the building, lots of equipment in the building, lots of things that they might be able to leverage real-time location systems for. And so those organizations are generally looking for a formal deal. They want to be able to keep track of equipment, and they want to provide a safe environment with a security solution for their staff. They might also want to look at safety around hand hygiene, so they're seeking a solution to make sure staff are washing their hands. We also might be looking at medication and other safety measures through environmental monitoring that we can provide. And then, in addition to that, they might be looking at getting into integration with their electronic health record and be able to incorporate patient flow." "RTLS-enabled patient flow ensures they can always see the actual location of their patients. Traditionally, they're used for seeing the assigned room, but that might not actually be where the patient is at that point in time. So, we can offer things like that, and that can be a real patient experience satisfier. And then you can also help with electronic health record integration, we can help them to capture major milestone pieces. " #HealthTech #SmartHospitals #PatientSafety #HealthcareInnovation #RTLS #RealTimeLocationSystems #AIinHealthcare #PatientExperience #HealthcareEfficiency #MedicalTechnology #DigitalHealth #AI #Burnout #Safety #StaffDuress #PatientCare CenTrak.com Download the transcript here

Todd Harris, CEO and Co-Founder of Tyra Biosciences, is focused on developing a selective inhibitor for FGFR3, a protein implicated in bladder cancer and childhood dwarfism. The company has developed the SNAP discovery platform to accelerate structure-based drug design targeting this specific protein, while avoiding effects on related proteins to minimize significant side effects. Their lead drug candidate has the potential to become a primary well-tolerated oral monotherapy, shifting the treatment paradigm for cancer patients to prevent recurrence and for children to allow for more typical bone growth. Todd explains, "We are taking a novel step to a set of conditions, genetic conditions in FGFR3 biology that have long been known, that others have attempted to address, but where the underlying chemistry hasn't had the necessary selectivity to really be able to make progress. FGFR3 biology is implicated both in bladder cancer and in kids with dwarfism and short stature conditions. And there have long been chemical matter drugs that can inhibit FGFR3, but also inhibit close family members, including FGFR1 and 2. These close family members, the nature of the close family members, make it very challenging to make a drug that is a drug candidate that selectively inhibits FGFR3 while sparing FGFR1, 2, and 4." "And it was a challenge we took on because we felt like we could meaningfully improve the outcomes for patients by doing so. FGFR3 has important biology in bone and cancer, but FGFR1 and 2 have important biology as well and can lead to side effects when inhibited at the same time as FGFR3. So our attempt to make a selective inhibitor is really an effort to minimize off-target tolerability effects, things that can affect, like pain in your nails, blistering of hands and feet, and elevated phosphate levels when taking the pan FGFR drugs. And then just focus on a drug that can inhibit FGFR3, avoid that type of toxicity, and be able to more meaningfully impact these genetic conditions." #TyraBio #TyraBiosciences #PrecisionMedicine #BladderCancer #RareDiseases #Achondroplasia #Biotechnology #DrugDevelopment #FGFR3 #Innovation #ClinicalTrials #Oncology #PediatricMedicine #StructureBasedDrugDesign tyra.bio Download the transcript here

Peyton Fry, Founder and owner of Glass Raven, discusses the complexities of patient access to healthcare and how healthcare systems often fall into the trap of measuring efficiency in ways that are financially beneficial for providers but are detrimental to patient care. Glass Raven helps organizations define key metrics of good patient access and the implementation of technology and AI to address the defined problems. This data-driven approach focuses on the populations most likely to benefit from improved patient access to care and informs a tailored, context-aware strategy for each healthcare system. Peyton explains, "Glass Raven focuses on providing services in patient access spaces and operations for healthcare systems. We typically work with medium to large healthcare systems and help them really get a feel and eyes on their own operations and what patient access means to them. Oftentimes, that starts with just defining what patient access is for a given space and then looking into call centers, referrals, and capacity to make sure that patients who want to be scheduled can be scheduled and that healthcare systems can control costs and gather the revenue from that." "I think patient access has been around for a long time. I think it probably falls under a lot of different umbrellas, which is part of the problem. If I started my career, I found that there just weren't many experts who focused on patient access as a discipline. I think that's because your patient access strategies will change depending on your payer mix. It'll change depending on your size and your capabilities as a system. So I think it's really hard to find the blueprint that someone else has used and move it from system to system. It's almost like you have to reinvent the wheel." #GlassRaven #HealthcareAccess #PatientExperience #HealthTech #AIinHealthcare #HealthcareOperations #DataAnalytics #HealthcareInnovation #PatientCare #HealthSystems #DigitalHealth GlassRaven.Health Download the transcript here

Dr. Tien Lee, Founder and CEO of Aardvark Therapeutics, draws a clear distinction between appetite and hunger and the implications for treating metabolic conditions and managing weight. The Aardvark lead drug candidate, an oral bitter taste receptor agonist designed to activate the gut-brain connection to turn off hunger, is showing effectiveness in treating Prader-Willi Syndrome and general obesity. There are also signs that this drug could be effective for those using GLP-1s to avoid nausea and prevent rebound weight gain experienced after discontinuing GLP-1 drugs. Tien explains, "That difference between hunger and appetite is the central thesis for our entire company, and your brain actually regulates how much you should eat. And it's driven by both appetite and hunger. So appetites like the carrot, and hunger is like the stick. Appetite is what you feel when you really enjoy a certain food, like ice cream or cake. And the appeal and the deliciousness of that food is a reward that your brain chases. Hunger is the feeling that you get when you have fasted for a prolonged period of time, and it really bothers you, and you feel real discomfort from not eating. And then at that point, food quality matters less, and you just want to escape that negative sensation. And we believe a lot of the current drugs are good at reducing appetite, but they don't so much address hunger like what our approach is pursuing." "In obesity, there's probably a combination of both appetite and hunger at play. And they're both important. In fact, your body has both appetite and hunger that are regulated. And when we eat food, our gut releases a number of gut hormones that help tamp down and give us satiety for both appetite and hunger. However, there are certain conditions where hunger is the predominant issue. And with the disease that is our lead indication is a condition called Prader-Willi syndrome. It's a rare genetic disorder that affects about one out of 15,000 live births. And patients with this condition have this unabated, unrelenting hunger that they feel that really starts to manifest when they're about four or seven years old. And then characteristically, patients will even feel compelled to eat garbage to the point of stomach rupture if unregulated with their food access. So it's a very debilitating condition with a lot of suffering for the patients and their families." "There are actually quite a number of new revelations in the scientific literature, and there's a greater appreciation of gut-brain signaling. So there are actually as many neurons in your gut as there are in your spinal cord, almost as many neurons as in the cat brain. And there's a greater appreciation of a two-way communication between your brain and the gut. So the vagus nerve is the largest nerve in your body, and there's actually a two-way communication between the gut and the brain. About 80% to 90% of the signal is actually from the gut to the brain. And even the drugs that people know currently, the Ozempic and the Zepbound drugs, are working through this gut path hormone. But naturally, a lot of the signals actually come from the gut to the brain through this vagus nerve conduction." #AardvarkTherapeutics #Hunger #Appetite #PraderWilliSyndrome #PWS #Hyperphagia #RareDiseases #BiotechInnovation #ObesityTreatment #GutBrainAxis #TasteReceptors #ClinicalTrials #Therapeutics #MetabolicHealth #PharmaceuticalInnovation aardvarktherapeutics.com Download the transcript here

Lawrence Blatt, Chairman, President, and CEO of Aligos Therapeutics, describes the current gaps in treating the hepatitis B virus and how the disease can potentially lead to end-stage liver disease and liver cancer. Current therapies were initially developed for HIV and can suppress the virus but not eliminate or prevent the disease. The lead Aligos drug candidate blocks all steps of viral replication and prevents the virus from integrating into infected liver cells, where it can activate cancer-causing genes. Lawrence explains, "Hepatitis B virus is actually the most prevalent chronic viral infection in the world that makes patients very ill, and they can actually die from this disease. There's almost 250 million, a little bit more than 250 million people infected with Hepatitis B. And it really affects people in all walks of life across many different demographic groups. So there's not a typical HPV patient out there." "So HBV needs to be treated for life, currently very similar to HIV, and actually HBV and HIV share common features. And early on in the HIV epidemic, patients who were treated with a class of drug called nucleoside analogs, who were also coinfected with HBV, we saw responses to those drugs. So the drugs that worked in HIV, called nucleoside or nucleotide analogs that were purposely built for HIV, worked against HBV, and they worked to a certain degree. They can suppress the virus, but they can't eliminate the virus, and they can't completely suppress all the components of the viral lifecycle that end up causing disease." "So we're not going to affect the damage that's there initially, but we're blocking that damage from occurring. Now, one thing that's really interesting is that our livers are regenerative organs. So the liver is constantly replacing itself with new healthy hepatocytes or cells that make up the liver. And so if you could block the ongoing disease processes, the liver will have time to heal itself and eventually reverse the scarring. And that's really the only organ in our body that can regenerate. If you get scarring on your lungs or any other part of your body, that is for life. But in the liver, if you block the disease processes, you can reverse that scarring. So it's a very important and unique finding." #AligosTherapeutics #HepatitisB #Biotechnology #DrugDevelopment #LiverHealth #ClinicalTrials #MedicalBreakthrough #PatientCare #Virology #PharmaceuticalInnovation #Vaccines Aligos.com Download the transcript here