Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Marc Hedrick, President and CEO of Plus Therapeutics Inc., has expanded their focus from glioblastoma to leptomeningeal metastasis, a central nervous system cancer that is a growing challenge due to increased survival rates from primary cancers. Their highly sensitive, advanced diagnostic test, CNSide, can detect cancer cells in cerebrospinal fluid, addressing the shortcomings of imaging and outdated standard-of-care practices. Using AI and advanced data analytics, their lead drug candidate is uniquely suited for treating CNS cancers because its safety at high doses enables the precise delivery of radiation. Marc explains, "Since we last talked and we discussed primarily the use of radiotherapeutics for the treatment of glioblastoma. We've expanded that pretty significantly into a disease called leptomeningeal metastasis. And I think we may have touched on that briefly, at least conceptually, a few years ago. But now it's really real. We've just completed a phase one trial, and we're expanding that with the goal of getting the drug approved, perhaps sooner than with glioblastoma, by focusing on leptomeningeal cancer, for which there's nothing approved. And maybe it would be a good idea to back up and explain a little bit about what that is, because there's an epidemic of it that's not commonly understood." "So the central nervous system is a protected organ in the body. Now, I mean the brain and the spinal cord. And it's that way for a reason to keep bad things out. Things like infections, tumors, or certain chemical toxins. And that includes drugs. Only about 2% of all drugs get into the central nervous system, which is a problem from a therapeutic perspective. But there's an epidemic in terms of metastases to the brain and spinal cord. Let's call those the CNS collectively. And that's because many common tumors like breast cancer, lung cancer, gastrointestinal cancers, and melanoma are better controlled locally with drugs that don't have to worry about getting into the central nervous system. They just need to get into those specific organs and tissues and then exert control over the tumor where it occurred." $PSTV #LM #CNS #Cancer #LeptomeningealMetastases #CNSide #BrainCancer #Oncology #Radiotherapeutics #MedicalInnovation #CancerResearch #Biotechnology #PatientCare #ClinicalTrials #HealthcareInnovation #CancerTreatment #Neuroscience #MedTech plustherapeutics.com Download the transcript here

Kristy Yoskey, VP and Market Leader at PointClickCare, sees the evolution of demands of those living in senior living facilities from expecting basic housing to a desire for lifestyle choices, health services, and engagement in meaningful activities. On the facilities side, there is a shift from reactive to proactive care, where technology is used to monitor residents, identify behavioral changes, support clinical decision-making, and intervene early to prevent adverse events. In addition, the complexity of resident care is increasing, blurring the line between hospitality and healthcare and requiring greater care coordination and real-time updates for providers and family members. Kristy explains, "We've seen a real shift within senior living, and this is sort of a passion of mine. Residents in senior living are not just looking for hospitality, a place to go, and a roof over their heads anymore. They want lifestyle. They want health, they want purpose in life, they want independence. So we've seen real shifts in acuity levels, which means complexity, care needs are shifting. And we're seeing families sort of wanting more transparency, real-time updates. COVID really shifted a lot of things post-2020, and senior living did not necessarily get past that." "So they want to know that their loved one's not only safe, but they're also thriving, and they're receiving care. Residents want to know that someone's going to help coordinate their care and not just put them in an apartment and leave them alone. They're moving in for something that they need, some sort of help or something that is beyond what they can do in a community-type home. So the last thing I'll say here is that hospitality and healthcare have really become blurred in senior living since COVID. It's been a hot topic. We're seeing a lot more clinical services onsite and a lot more coordinated care happening. So the teams, the tools, all of that happening onsite within assisted independent memory care are now a necessity." #PointClickCare ##SeniorLiving #HealthTech #AI #DigitalHealth #ElderCare #ResidentWellness #HealthcareInnovation #ProactiveCare #SeniorCare #PointClickCare #WellnessCoordination #HealthcareTransformation #AgingInPlace #ClinicalTechnology pointclickcare.com Download the transcript here

Sarah Smith, Qualitative Specialist and Global Behavioral Science Strategy Lead at Oracle Life Sciences, is focused on the critical role of behavioral science in improving recruitment and retention in clinical trials. Oracle Life Sciences is working to address historical underrepresentation in clinical trials by combining behavioral insights with integrated technologies to identify at-risk populations and understand barriers to participation. Using nudges to encourage trial participation, conducting decentralized trials, and applying AI to reshape patient engagement are strong tools for building trust and improving accessibility. Sarah explains, "Behavioral science is about understanding behavior. It draws from a number of disciplines like psychology, anthropology, and behavioral economics. But what it tells us is that people aren't rational. They don't always do the things that we expect them to do. So if we want to engage people, if we want to engage them properly, if we want to ensure that all the things we do are equitable and have an equal playing field, then we need to really understand why people do the things they do and to try and help us make sense of that in a way that encompasses everybody." "We see treatment and technology advancing, but there are many communities that aren't part of that still, that are underrepresented. Factors like gender, ethnicity, culture, conditions that carry a stigma, socioeconomic issues, and geographic limitations - all of these things can limit the opportunity, ability, and willingness of individuals to participate in clinical trials. And that means the impact of those trials is less generalizable because those people are not represented. They're just simply not there. So the treatment that is aimed at these people is not measured in those groups. Oracle is working to address this by combining a deeper understanding of behavior with integrated technology to try to close this gap in representation to give more inclusive patient-centered care that unifies clinical, behavioral, and safety data across settings. To give a more holistic view, to give more coordinated care, to identify risks earlier, to identify patients that perhaps just need a bit more attention - a more personalized engagement." #OracleLifeSciences #lifesciences #ClinicalResearch #PatientCentricity #PatientEngagement #ClinicalTrials #Healthliteracy #BehavioralScience #HealthEquity #AI #Healthcare #Diversity #Inclusion #MedicalResearch #Innovation Oracle.com/life-sciences Download the transcript here

Dr. Josh Eloge, Associate Director for the Woman's Board Treatment Research Center, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Rush University Medical Center, and Founder of Connected Neuroscience has a focus on treatment-resistant depression which is defined as depression that is not relieved by at least two first-line medications. Research has identified that TRD is associated with hyperactivity in a specific brain region, shifting attention from a chemical view of depression to a neurobiological one. Research on deep-brain stimulation and implantable technology is demonstrating neuromodulation and reductions in hyperactivity. Josh explains, "So depression, kind of a low mood, is something that is universally experienced, right? It's part of the human condition to a certain extent. However, when a low mood persists for most of the time and is accompanied by problems with being able to enjoy things, disruptions in sleep, appetite, or even thoughts about life not being worth living, one might be experiencing something called a major depressive episode, part of a major depressive disorder. And this is a specific psychiatric disorder that requires attention. Frankly, there are poor outcomes associated with this. About one in five Americans will experience a major depressive episode at some time in their life, so it's a little bit more common than people might think, and there are some effective treatments. So in my work, both seeing patients and in the research that I do here at Rush, we're looking at major depressive episode and trying to think how can we best treat this disorder to get people back to being able to enjoy things that they like to do, being with their family, have meaningful work, these sorts of things." "However, the research also shows that about a third of patients who try these different medications don't ultimately get the response that we are hoping for. And this has been termed treatment-resistant depression - when you try at least two of these first-line medications, but the symptoms are still present, and this is where a lot of the research that we've been working on in this specific population has been focused on." #ConnectedNeuroscience #MentalHealth #Neuroscience #DeepBrainStimulation #TreatmentResistantDepression #MedicalResearch #Innovation #RushUniversity #BrainHealth #ClinicalTrials #Psychiatry #NeuroModulation #DBS #TRANSCENDstudy #TRD connectedneuroscience.com Download the transcript here

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