Dr. Joseph Dayan is a board-certified plastic and reconstructive surgeon at the Institute for Lymphatic Surgery and Innovation, a division of the Institute for Advanced Reconstruction. Doctors have traditionally focused on treating cancer rather than long-term effects such as lymphedema, a swelling condition caused by dysfunction of the lymphatic system. New surgical techniques such as lymph node transplants and lymphovenous bypasses can help reconstruct the lymphatic system and reduce lymphedema symptoms. Joseph explains, "Lymphedema is swelling, usually most often in the arms or legs, that’s permanent and often gets worse over time caused by dysfunction of your lymphatic system. The lymphatic system is basically the sewage system of the body. It clears out fluid waste from your body’s tissues and channels that waste into your lymph nodes, which are part of your immune system that has billions of immune cells that kill bacteria and purify that waste. That fluid then goes back into your veins and back in the bloodstream. When that’s not functioning, that fluid can get backed up, causing swelling in all parts of the body, but also infection, sometimes even life-threatening infections. It is currently incurable, and generally, it gets worse over time, as chronic diseases tend to do." "There are some types of chemotherapy that do cause problems with the lymphatic system, the taxane therapies like Cytoxan, but most commonly for patients undergoing removal of their lymph nodes, the removing of the lymph nodes or radiation to the lymph nodes or both are the most common cause of cancer-related lymphedemas." "I think there are two reasons. Historically, lymphedema was not something typically seen by a doctor or treated by an MD. It’s a disease typically sent to a physical therapist or occupational therapist specializing in lymphedema therapy without being able to offer treatment. I think doctors focus on those things that they can help with. And so one part I think in the MD’s mind is that there’s not a whole lot you can do for it. The other part is at the time of the cancer diagnosis, understandably, the cancer is number one, two, and three priorities, and the consequences of cancer treatment fall a distance second."  #Lymphedema #Cancer #LymphedemaAwareness #BreastReconstruction #LymphovenousBypass #LymphNodeTransplant #LymphaticSurgery #LymphedemaTreatmentAct #GLP1 advancedreconstruction.com/lymphedema Download the transcript here

Dr. Tom Coughlin, Founder and CEO of OncRef, has developed a platform that provides oncologists with a single source of information to keep up with the rapidly evolving field of cancer research and therapies. OncRef is addressing oncologists' information overload and time constraints, as well as curating and structuring the vast amount of available cancer data. The company recognizes the potential for AI and data-driven tools to advance cancer care while acknowledging the challenges of developing hallucination-proof AI models for use in the medical field.   Tom explains, "OncRef is looking to create a single source of truth for oncologists to keep up with the field of cancer. Cancer is now progressing so quickly with more personalized medicine. And now, with AI, more research publications are being published than ever, making it extremely hard to stay on top of this field. So, we're making it very easy by providing oncologists and oncology professionals with a single source of truth, all curated, and giving them exactly what they need rather than having them drink through the firehose of data out there because it's too much right now. So we're taking that pain out of it."  "The data is organized in a cancer-specific way. So, categorized by specific cancers and by having a consistent user interface and interaction, we just add the data to our interface so that the user can see what's changing over time. They do not have to wonder where the data is or be uncertain if they are getting lost in that information or perhaps missing what's happening on that constantly moving and progressing leading edge of cancer research." "We rely on a lot of government data and published information. This government data is sometimes very disorganized and unstructured. So, we have a robust team of data engineers that can structure the data and apply some categorization and labeling using our medical team, which curates the data so we can provide some structure to it to present it on our platform. That's really what we're most excited about. By structuring all of this unstructured data, we're setting the stage for a future Large Language Model or system that we can have less likelihood of hallucination. So, by having structured curated data, we will move towards something more reliable and give oncology an AI they can trust." #OncRef #CancerResearch #Cancer #Oncology #HeathTech #MedAI oncref.com Download the transcript here

Bradley Bostic, CEO of hc1, uses advanced data science, AI, and natural language processing to identify optimal patient testing, better predict disease development, and provide insights that can help prevent disease progression. The use of lab data is crucial for making diagnostic decisions, yet the potential of leveraging data is not being realized. Using technology to address issues like over-utilization of testing and data silos that prevent clinicians from seeing the complete story, hc1 is building a diagnostic insight network that unifies the provider and pharmacists to improve the patient journey and improve outcomes. Bradley explains, "We are transforming laboratories into strategic assets that improve patient care and boost the bottom line for healthcare systems. And really, the way that I came about this was having been in the healthcare industry for quite a while, most of my career, I started seeing this common fact that data was important. The largest component of the data that was used to make diagnostic decisions and diagnose patients was lab data. It's like 80% of all diagnostic decisions at least are informed by lab data. Yet, of everybody I saw out there looking to leverage data, there wasn't anybody that I saw who was hyper-specialized in how you can leverage signals from lab data to make patients healthier. I decided there was a void in the market and that we could be the best in the world. So that's what we've been working on here at hc1." "What we've been able to do is use these advanced data science capabilities, use artificial intelligence, use natural language understanding to not only be able to identify the optimal testing for patients at any given time to get to the best diagnosis faster. But also to become predictive - to identify those people in that constellation of signals who, for example, are trending toward developing chronic kidney disease or those people who are trending toward developing diabetes or any number of different disease states. We have created an artificial intelligence model that can identify individuals who are highly predisposed to developing cognitive decline well into the future without any sort of a specialized test, but just using routine test values all analyzed in this constellation."  #hc1 #HealthTechLeaders #LabData #HealthTech #HealthcareAI #HealthAI #FutureOfHealthcare #HealthcareTech #LabDiagnostics #HealthcareAnalytics hc1.com Download the transcript here

Niels Riedemann, the CEO, Founder, and Executive Director of the Board of InflaRx, explains that InflaRx develops pioneering anti-inflammatory therapeutics against a specific portion of the complement cascade, a part of the body’s immune system that responds to infectious microbes. By applying its proprietary monoclonal anti-C5a and anti-C5aR technologies, InflaRx hopes to affect the progression of a wide variety of inflammatory diseases.  Niels explains, "Absolutely. So, I was a postdoc and research fellow at the University of Michigan and I researched this immune response I was talking about with another fellow in settings of sepsis of devastating, life-threatening inflammation and the other fellow and myself found it so intriguing that we ended up founding a company saying we're going to one day hopefully save people's lives with this approach by controlling this immune response. And when COVID came along, while we had a focus on other diseases and we have a key focus on devastating chronic diseases as well in the immune dermatological space and others, when COVID came along, we had all this knowledge and all this work in the immune response in life-threatening infections including in other viruses with our drug, for example, in an influenza type of virus. But we had not tested it, of course, in COVID or humans with this disease." "We felt we had to do something about it. We were very sure that this was a potential lifesaving approach. So we ended up running what we believe is the largest global study, a one-to-one randomized placebo-controlled study that was powered to show a benefit, a survival benefit, in the most severely sick COVID-patients. And when I say most severely sick, I really mean patients that need invasive mechanical ventilation or even lung replacement therapy, also called ECMO. So that's our focus, and we ended up showing a survival benefit. We may be talking about this a bit today, but it’s an interesting story and a life endeavor. I should probably also mention that in order to better understand the other side of the research part, I became a physician, and I actually ran a large academic ICU in Germany for almost seven years, and also enrolled patients in trials. So, I know how it is as an intensive care physician to take care of patients when they're that devastatingly sick. The lots of motivations within the company, and we are really glad that we could bring this drug forward to help patients." InflaRx.de Download the transcript here  

Michael Oleksiw is the CEO of Pleio, a company focused on addressing the emotional barriers to patient engagement and medication adherence that medical professionals often overlook. Emotional barriers like loneliness, fear, and stigma can impact patients of all ages and backgrounds when they are facing a health challenge. Pleio uses technology and a peer-to-patient model to personalize interactions with empathetic humans, provide ongoing patient support, track emotional patterns, and bring pharmacists in to work with patients taking multiple medications or with chronic conditions.   Michael explains, "Our focus on the emotional barriers is meant to complement what’s out there today. The bulk of the focus when it comes to engaging patients and supporting patients is really on supporting the transaction, ensuring that a patient can get their medication, that they can get it cost-effectively, that they can pick it up, that it gets into their hands. But once they’re at home, everything gets real really fast and they’re faced with a variety of emotions such as loneliness, stigma, fear, etc. The American Medical Association recognizes that five of the eight major barriers to adherence are emotional, as I mentioned. So we try to stay in that swim lane and connect with the patient to target those barriers as a complement to all the stuff already being done out there." "You can say that we break White Coat syndrome in that we get the patient to focus on what’s important to them. Many times, patients don’t know or are intimidated by their healthcare professionals and don’t know how to engage in conversation. So one of the things we do is instill confidence so they can engage in fruitful conversations with their pharmacists and the like. So, the best way to think of it is we’re an extension of the pharmacy. We bring that trust and the care in the pharmacy into the home with what we call a peer-to-patient model where patients engage in conversation with people just like them to complement the baseline they received at the pharmacy." "Technology helps us be more efficient in terms of the patients we target, the words we choose, and the times we call. So, our view on technology is we use technology to support human interaction and make it better, optimize it, and make it more efficient, but not replace it. So, we don’t use technology to pretend to be human. Humans do a good job at that. I think humans could own being human. Technology is meant to support the human to be more efficient, make things more personalized, and take that step back to see the big picture and address trends over time." #Pleio #MedicationAdherence #PatientEngagement #EmotionalBarriers #MedAI #DigitalHealth pleio.com Download the transcript here

Dan Levendowski, Co-Founder and President, and Chris Berka, Co-Founder and CEO of Advanced Brain Monitoring, have developed medical devices that measure brain activity through electroencephalography (EEG) during awake and sleeping states. These easy-to-use EEG devices can be used at home and in a clinic to identify biomarkers for cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases.  The company has built large databases of EEG data from healthy individuals and those with various neurodegenerative diseases, which allows them to compare a patient's brain activity to healthy controls and track changes over time.   Dan explains, "We're now in year seven of a large longitudinal study where we've identified and extracted these measures of the brain's electrical activity under different conditions that help us differentiate or characterize whether the person has normal cognition or their sleep looks like somebody with normal cognition. Or how the brain responds to certain stimuli and if it looks like somebody with Parkinson's disease or early Alzheimer's disease. We do that both during sleep and during wake."  Chris elaborates, "What differentiates our products is that Dan mentioned that we've received a little over $40 million in funding from NIH, DARPA, and other funding sources. And that has allowed us to create very large databases with tens of thousands of recordings from healthy controls. So people ages 6 to 96. For any new patient that comes in, we can compare their brain to a group of people in the same age range and sex and say, how far are you quantitatively from your healthy control peers?" "We print everything, all of the EEG sensors, on a very lightweight flex cable, which is easily applied and hits all the target sites according to the neurology 10-20 system. That is fully disposable. So after you take it off, you discard it. It's only used once. Then, all of the electronics for our system, which does the amplification of the signals, the digitization of the signals, and then sending via Bluetooth to a laptop or a handheld or desktop computer. All of that is in a very small electronics box worn on the head. The entire system weighs less than three ounces. So we've had patients wear it for many hours and forget they're wearing it. It's so lightweight and comfortable." #AdvancedBrainMonitoring #EEG #NeuroBiomarkers #Cognition #NeuroDiagnosticDevice #AlzheimersDisease #Dementia #ParkinsonsDisease #LewyBodyDementia advancedbrainmonitoring.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Julie Schulz, VP of product at Avalon Healthcare Solutions, a company that helps health plans manage their laboratory spend and benefits by contracting with labs and analyzing lab data.  Lab tests are important for identifying the right patients for GLP-1 drugs and assessing their cardiometabolic health. While GLP-1 drugs were initially developed for diabetes they have been found to have broader benefits in treating conditions like obesity, heart disease, and kidney disease.  Avalon's real-time access to lab data can help health plans and providers better identify appropriate patients for GLP-1 drugs and address health equity and access issues. Julie explains, "Labs are increasingly looking at biomarkers that provide an overall sense of patient health. Molecular diagnostics, including genetic testing, is on the upswing. Understanding the complexities of that testing and the clinical decisions that come from it is more and more important for health plan employers in the broader healthcare ecosystem." "So GLP-1 drugs were initially indicated for diabetes and help patients who struggle to control their diabetes with other medications to help bring down their hemoglobin A1c. But we found they have a much broader effect on the entire cardio kidney metabolic syndrome. Increasingly, clinicians in the American Heart Association are recognizing that cardiorenal metabolic syndrome is a collection of related disorders that involve cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, liver disease, and others as well. What's interesting about GLP-1s is they've been shown to have an impact on many of these systems." "Now all of those labs can come together and can actually be used to calculate a score of a patient's tenure and 30-year risk of major adverse cardiac events. So, heart attack and stroke, but also heart failure. So, bringing all those things together will inform the patient's broader cardiometabolic health status and can also help start identifying patients who will benefit the most from these drugs." #AvalonHCS #LaboratoryBenefitsManager #HealthPlans #HealthEquity #GLP1 #CardiometabolicDiseases #Obesity #KidneyDisease #HeartDisease avalonhcs.com Download the transcript here  

Adrian Mendes, CEO of Perimeter Medical Imaging AI, is solving the problem of margin assessment in cancer surgery. Surgeons often have to perform a second surgery on breast cancer patients because they are unable to completely remove all of the cancerous cells the first time. The company has developed Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) imaging technology that allows surgeons to see cells at a microscopic level in real-time during surgery, helping them remove the tumor and all surrounding cancerous tissue. Adrian explains, "The surgeon is trying to ensure that when they extract the tumor and the cancer, there is a margin of healthy cells around it. Studies have shown that if they can achieve that, and with breast cancer, that margin needs to be two millimeters generally, then the likelihood of them having left cancer cells back in the body goes down drastically. This is every surgeon's objective for cancer treatment. We help the surgeons ensure that they've achieved what they call clean margins." "Yes, it's quite significant. So, for breast cancer surgery alone, it's about one in every five surgeries are unsuccessful because the margins aren't clean, and then the patient has to come back for a second surgery. So, there are about 300,000 breast cancer surgeries per year in the United States. If you think about 20% of that, there are a lot of women that are having to go back for a second surgery every year. That's just in the United States. And it's a global problem." "What's unique about our technology is we use an imaging tech called OCT or Optical Coherence Tomography that allows images to be created down at around 15-micron width level. And that's small enough to be able to distinguish cells. And so with that, it just gives the surgeon so much more ability to see what they're looking at." "The next generation uses the same imaging modality, the OCT imaging, but it adds an artificial intelligence and AI layer to it. So what we've done is trained an AI algorithm to recognize suspicious areas inside images of breast tissue. And these suspicious areas are indicative of cancer. The way we train the model is we have a library of about 2 million images of breast tissue, both cancerous and healthy tissue, and we've got labels that have been provided by pathologists." #PerimeterMedical #Oncology #BreastCancerSurgery #OCT #Tumors #MedAI perimetermed.com Download the transcript here

Brent Lucas, CEO of Envoy Medical, highlights the lack of innovation in hearing aids and the need to better address hearing health. Envoy has developed fully implanted hearing devices that provide 24/7 hearing assistance without the need for daily recharging of the battery.  With the introduction of over-the-counter hearing aids and the advanced Apple AirPods Pro 2, customer options have been expanded, making it easier to address some forms of hearing loss. Implanted devices eliminate the limitations of external hearing aids and reduce the impact of hearing loss on their daily lives. Brent explains, "Part of the problem in the hearing loss industry has been that it's not well understood. So there has not been a great deal of competition and innovation in the hearing loss world. Most of us have thought about hearing loss and how it's addressed by looking to our grandparents, the elders. Plenty of people joke about our dads or our grandfathers not being able to hear our grandmothers. When I tell people I'm in the hearing industry, the first thing that they say is, I can't hear you. And I always fall for it. And I say, I'm in the hearing industry, and they come clean that it was a joke. At the end of the day, there are unmet needs in finding solutions for people that are not just the status quo. That's really where Envoy Medical is building products that are fully implanted, in a sense, a better life because they're not tied to their hearing loss." "Right now, the current solutions on the market are all external products that need to be taken off at night or around water in the shower, during strenuous activity, working out, sweating too much, that sort of thing. You have to take your external device off. Our devices are fully implanted, meaning you can be capable of hearing 24/7, hearing all day, every day. We think that's the right thing to do for a patient because your hearing loss, after all, is a 24-hour problem. It shouldn't be that your solution is only on for part of the day."  #EnvoyMedical #HearingLoss #Acclaim #HearingAids #CochlearImplant $COCH #HearingHealth  envoymedical.com Download the transcript here

Caleb Manscill, President of Vyne Medical, has a mission to present a holistic view of data, from origination to use, within a healthcare organization. The goal is to guide them to find ways to streamline the workflow, save time, reduce errors and costs, and improve patient outcomes. Using AI to handle faxes, data entry, and other administrative tasks can free up staff to handle issues that require human intervention. Vyne Medical provides insights about implementing technology and overcoming cultural resistance to changes in healthcare organizations.  Caleb explains, "We've got multiple use cases, but I'll speak to two. The first one is the simple handling of faxes. There's lots of unstructured data coming into different points of care. In this case, I'll talk about the hospital, but there are lots of referrals being made. There are lab reports being sent and there's data that needs to be appended through HIM. Often, this data will come in through the fax machine as unstructured data, and individuals will pick up this paper. And we're talking, again, going back to the paper and picking it up and keying it in. There's the risk, not to mention miskeying it or accuracy. Still, that process is potentially taking place anywhere. If it's a simple patient order, it could take a few minutes. If it's an extensive lab report, it could take upwards of 20 minutes. The automation or AI utilized within our product suite and platform can take that down to 30 seconds or even just a few seconds, depending on the workflow that needs to be initiated."   "That's why we exist in that very specific use case of fax management. The way that our solution works is it streamlines the whole process so that there isn't any paper handling. So it's almost as if it's being sent electronically, through the internet, or however you want it to be. What's most important to us is that if they're not going to change their behavior, at least we can meet them where they are and streamline it as if they had adopted the most up-to-date APIs or ways of sending those data." #VyneMedical #Workflow #Hospitals #Automation #HospitalWorkflow vynemedical.com Download the transcript here