Joe Tucker, CEO of Enveric Biosciences, is developing non-hallucinogenic psychedelic drugs that aim to induce neuroplasticity and beneficial changes in the brains of patients with mental health disorders. The FDA rejected the approval of MDMA for PTSD treatment due to concerns about the inability to run blind trials to separate the placebo effect from the effects of the drug. Enveric addresses the promise of neuroplastic drugs that stimulate the neural connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala without hallucinations. Joe explains, "And the problem, endemic to hallucinogenic psychedelics, is that there's no question in the patient's mind, in the doctor's mind, in everybody's mind whether or not they got an hallucinogenic agent. And so when everybody knows whether they got it or not, that's what you call functional unblinding. And so the FDA was very concerned about this. They said you must be able to separate the placebo from the actual drug. Until we see data that gives us confidence that you separated it, we can't approve it, even though it looks like a very positive impact for the patients." "We were looking precisely to see if we could remove the hallucination without removing the benefit. So that's the field we're in. What's it being called right now? It's a very, very new field being called the non-hallucinogenic neuroplastogen- neuroplastogen indicating that it induces neuroplasticity, in other words, rewiring of the brain, but does so without inducing hallucination. We saw two challenges coming: How do you separate placebo from non-placebo effect and the treatment?" "Then the idea would be, hopefully, this psychedelic treatment was so impactful, you didn't need to take any other treatment again for a long period of time. And that seems pretty aspirational, honestly, and likely to get in the way of real patient acceptance that you want something which is not so sort of rock your world. Most people don't want that. They like to be able to have a drug that is like, take an aspirin. You take it every day. You don't have a big impact. You can go about your life. You don't really notice it other than you feel better. And that's the idea behind the non-hallucinogenic neuroplastogen. It fits much more in line with what patients are looking for and expecting and doctors, the whole healthcare system. It just makes a lot more sense." #MentalHealth #MentalHealthDisorders #MentalHealthEpidemic #Depression #Anxiety #PTSD #Neuroplastogens #Psychedelics  enveric.com Download the transcript here

Ray Jordan is the principal at Putnam Insights, a strategic communications and policy consulting firm, and a partner at Echo Research. The core elements of reputation building are consistent across large and small companies. Many companies mistakenly think that a good reputation comes naturally, but building and maintaining a strong reputation requires a clear mission statement and an authentic voice to reinforce the company's message. Ray elaborates, "In particular, when I've worked on reputation matters, including a lot of reputation on companies, smaller companies are more instinctual rather than based on data. The core elements of reputation are still there. What you need to do is build it, what you can do to lose it, and how it adds value to what you're doing. All of those elements are consistent in some respects. Very different situations, but they have much of the same core elements. That's true from the clinical side, the regulatory side, and the patient care side. From the opinion leader side across the spectrum, including reputation communication." "So, to my mind, building it involves first knowing who and what you are and having a clear definition of yourself. The second is acting consistent with that characterization of who and what you are. The third is being seen acting that way, so being visible in those actions. Those are simple steps. They're not easy steps to accomplish, but they're simple. Who you are, how you behave, and whether you behave accordingly and are seen in that behavior."  #CorporateCommunications #LeadershipInHealthcare #CrisisManagement #ESGStrategy #ReputationManagement #HealthcareLeadership  putnaminsights.com echoresearch.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Shankar Musunuri, Chairman of the Board, CEO, and Co-Founder of Ocugen, is developing gene therapies for rare blindness diseases like retinitis pigmentosa and Stargardt disease, which have significant unmet medical needs. The modifier gene therapy approach aims to reset homeostasis and create a healthy environment for photoreceptors to stabilize vision loss. Ocugen is also working on a gene therapy for dry age-related macular degeneration, which has the potential to address the late-stage geographic atrophy form of the disease. Shankar explains, "Vision is the most important part for all of us. Many years ago, when we founded Ocugen, it was based on targeting the ophthalmology disease area. We looked into many blindness diseases related to the back of the eye/retina. We have diseases such as AMD- and many people get into that – age-related macular degeneration. Then, there are diseases that are inherited in nature, like retinitis pigmentosa and Stargardt disease. A lot of these diseases impact many families globally. Therefore, our passion for patients has driven that. If there is a significant unmet medical need, we want to take that as a challenge and provide solutions for patients and provide that hope." "There are two rare blindness diseases. One is retinitis pigmentosa. There are about two million people globally who struggle with it. About 300,000 patients are in the US and EU. Effects in about 100 genes can cause retinitis pigmentosa. With our modifier game-changing gene therapy technology, potentially, our one product, which is currently going through a Phase 3 clinical trial, can target this entire population, rather than building or developing 100 products with the traditional gene therapy gene. The second inherited retinal disease we are working on, Stargardt, affects about 100,000 patients in the US and EU. Similar to RP, there are no therapies today to treat these patients’ significant unmet medical needs." #Ocugen #CourageousInnovation #GeneTherapy #ModifierGeneTherapy #BlindnessDiseases #RetinitisPigmentosa #GeographicAtrophy #Stargardt ocugen.com Download the transcript here

Allen Cooper, President, CEO, and Co-Founder of ReadyList, highlights the challenges environmental services (EVS) leaders face in hospitals: controlling healthcare-associated infections, managing facility maintenance, and meeting patient expectations. Ensuring efficient room turnover for patient rooms and operating rooms is critical to maintaining workflow and avoiding delays. Real-time tracking, task management, and data-driven insights help EVS managers and staff eliminate outdated, inefficient methods and improve patient outcomes and safety in hospital operations. Allen explains, "When you look at it from a patient's perspective, I think meeting and exceeding patients’ expectations of getting great quality care is probably at the forefront of everyone's mind. There's a lot of competition out there between hospitals and health systems. I think, looking from a patient's point of view, making sure that the patients are delighted is number one. A close number 2, if not number 1, is making sure that the hospitals themselves are controlling and reducing their healthcare-associated infections. I think that's been such a hot topic in the last 10-plus years, making sure that the patients are safe and taken care of, and when they leave, they're in a better spot than before they came." "We have four core modules of ReadyList. One is called ReadyList Room Care, which empowers the EVS cleaners to understand what's expected of them to turn over a room in a given day or hour. And it details out what's expected in a given room. Each unit in the hospital typically has different requirements and ensures that the equipment is what is actually supposed to be in place and that cleaning is done appropriately and done repeatedly the same way every single time. So the tool provides almost like a script for the cleaners so they understand exactly what their expectations are. On the flip side, for the supervisors, it also allows them to understand exactly what is going on, which rooms are cleaned or being cleaned, and who's doing what." #ReadyList #HospitalOperations #EVSManagement #EVSLeader #EnvironmentalService #EVS #HospitalFloorcare #FacilityOperation #Healthcare #HospitalSafety #HospitalInfectionPrevention ReadyList.com Download the transcript here

Sheila Phicil, Founder and CEO of Phicil-itate Change, works with innovators in healthcare to apply new technologies to solutions that incorporate the patients' voice. One goal is to reduce resistance to change, which often stems from the desire to avoid adding more complexity, by listening to patients, physicians, and community organizations. Data analytics and awareness of social determinants of health can provide insights to develop effective and sustainable solutions. Still, the data must be collected and analyzed in a way that preserves the context and individual experience. Shelia explains, "Well, the simplest way I can put it is helping the helpers and in this case, it's helping people who want to bring forward good innovation in healthcare. To do it well by focusing the work around the patient's lived experience through understanding their stories and their health data. So what I'm aiming to do is to, one, put out great frameworks and strategies around how to do this well and efficiently and effectively. We are building a platform utilizing blockchain and AI to automate some of this work in collecting patient stories and data and generating insights into how to design health tech solutions that meet their needs." "So all forms of social innovation, where we're trying to solve human problems, should always start with the people who have lived the experience of the problem and understand through their lens what their perspective is. What I often tell people, especially in the healthcare space, is that someone who has a lived experience of having diabetes or lost a loved one to cancer or is dealing with a rare disease, they become the expert. They become the expert in what that looks like for them, how that affects their life, and what they can tolerate in terms of coping or treatment and other things." #SocialDeterminantsofHealth #SDOH #MedTech #DataAnalytics Phicil-itateChange.com Download the transcript here

Lisa Ricciardi, CEO, and Dr. Tony Caggiano, Chief Medical Officer at Cognition Therapeutics, are developing effective treatments for neurological disorders, particularly Alzheimer's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). While DLB is related to Parkinson's, sharing symptoms include hallucinations, sleep disorders, and cognitive dysfunction, there are no good diagnostics to identify DLB and effective treatments. Cognition Therapeutics' lead drug candidate, an oral treatment, has shown promise in protecting neurons from the toxic effects of the pathological proteins involved in Alzheimer's and DLB. Lisa explains, "This company started in 2007, so we've had a long number of years to burnish our mission. One of the things we say is we're the beginning of the end of neurologic disorders and the start of hope for an improved future for patients. So Alzheimer's disease, in particular, has been long studied with little success, and in the last few years, we've seen some successes with monoclonal antibodies. There are a number of other approaches in clinical trials, but we have recently generated very positive data in two different trials with an oral once-a-day drug." Tony elaborates, "Lewy body dementia or dementia with Lewy bodies is a disease very much related to Parkinson's disease that's believed to be, in part, caused by pathological levels of a certain protein called alpha synuclein and particularly small oligomers of misfolded alpha synuclein." "And in Alzheimer's disease, this is largely a cognitive memory disorder as it presents. So, those two diseases are very different. Now, the idea of treating them with a single drug is somewhat unique to what we have here at Cognition Therapeutics. So our company started around the idea of developing therapies for Alzheimer's disease, and our lead molecule CT1812 or zervimesine was developed out of a screening assay where we were looking for molecules that could protect neurons or brain cells from the toxicities of this pathological amyloid protein. So, we identified CT1812 and have been developing it."  #CognitionTherapeutics #BrainHealth #DementiaCare #LewyStrong #Livingwithlewy #Alzheimers #EndAlz #Alzheimersdisease #DLBAwareness #NeurodegenerativeDisease #Dementia #DementiaWithLewyBodies  cogrx.com Download the transcript here

Arielle Smith, the President of Life Science at Event Cadence, discusses the changes in the event technology landscape and the expectations of pharmaceutical companies and attendees for a hybrid approach, including participation in person and virtually. There is an increased demand for insight capturing and analytics to measure the return on investment in conferences and the time attendees spend there. The platform includes scheduling, appointment management, and lead generation with tools to encourage networking and interaction to enhance the event experience.   Arielle explains, "Medical conferences are held all over the world, as you know, and there's not always going to be a time where you can physically put boots on the ground and travel for them. So we're seeing a lot more of a hot tier point, a hybrid model approach to it where, let's say, the majority of the team will be in a meeting room face to face with some of their HCPs, but then even that HCP might decide to dial in their counterpart. Or if a pharmaceutical client is not able to participate in person for many different reasons, we're looping them in from a virtual perspective as well. And our platform can help coordinate all of that." "So there's a lot of talk in the industry about insight capturing and gathering and exactly how that can be done but how best to make it actionable. Many great platforms are spinning up recently that are meant for capturing recordings or recording a conversation like the one you and I are having now, but then using AI to transcribe it all. A lot of our accounts are playing with technology like that, and then our platform is being used to set those conversations up."  #EventCadence #MedicalConferences #ConferenceManagement #HybridConferences eventcadence.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Thomas Chen, Founder, CEO, and CSO of NeOnc Technologies, is working on the challenge of delivering drugs across the blood-brain barrier by using an intranasal delivery approach to target brain cancers. This delivery platform leverages the cranial nerve to transport the drugs directly to the brain, bypassing the blood-brain barrier. Genomic analysis of the long-surviving patients in the phase one trial revealed a common genetic mutation, informing the trial design for the next phase. Thomas explains, "So our platform is what we call intranasal delivery. And with the intranasal delivery, we're not trying to cross the blood-brain barrier. We're trying to cross over it. And how we're doing that is doing the delivery of the drug via what we call the C nerves. Now the cranial nerves are, we have 12 cranial nerves in our brain. These cranial nerves have various functions, but the cranial nerves involved with the nasal brain delivery are the first and the fifth cranial nerves. The first cranial nerve is what we call the olfactory nerve. That's the nerve that's responsible for smell. The fifth cranial nerve is called the trigeminal nerve, which involves facial sensation and allows us to chew."   "So what happens is that when we want to deliver the drug to the brain cancer, we have the patient inhale it. When the patient inhales, it goes through the nose, and through the olfactory nerve, it goes to the brain. Usually, that molecule then absorbs in the spinal brain and then circulates to the target, in this case, brain cancer. Now you know how powerful that cranial nerve is from the standpoint of what it does when you smell something, that scent, that odor gets transported from the olfactory nerve to our brain. And that's basically what we're doing. We're taking something external to the brain, allowing the cranial nerve to absorb and transport it to the brain." #NeOnc #BloodBrainBarrier #BBB #BrainCancer #DrugDelivery neonc.com Download the transcript here

Ali Morin, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer at symplr, emphasizes the need to focus on the challenges nurses face and AI's potential to reduce administrative burdens and nurse burnout. Significant staffing shortages, scheduling challenges, and increased patient acuity demand better data analytics and technology implementation to allow nurses to spend more time with patients and improve patient care. For successful integration of technology solutions into the nurses' workflow, pilot tests, training of new and experienced nurses, and listening to their concerns and ideas are essential. Ali explains, "We focus on the nursing informatics side -- that middle communicator between technology and the nurses at the bedside. So, I consider myself a translator. I listen to the clinicians and the nurses who are using our software, and we have a number of solutions that are applicable for direct care nurses as well as nurse managers and nurse leaders. I take in the pain points that they're experiencing today and bring them to our developers and our product teams. This allows them to understand the pain points that nurses are experiencing and how we can help solve some of those problems." "However, we're taking it to the next level and putting in some additional machine learning around which nurses are still available to pick up shifts and which nurses are still available who haven't maybe met their core component. Today, how that's done: there are spreadsheets, call lists, and post-it notes all over the place. Who have I called? Who have I checked with? Who hasn't seen this manual kind of back-and-forth? And so our work is really to make that balancing phase of the nursing scheduling simpler, pun intended, 100%, but also simpler so that we can make it so those nurses and nurse managers, the nurses can say, I want to work these kinds of shifts. The nurse managers can say, great, plug them in, and off they go. And then it's less time in that kind of back and forth between them." #symplr #Nurses #HealthTech #HealthcareAI #CompassSurvey  symplr.com Download the transcript here

Maggie Cline, Executive Director at EyeCare4Kids Utah, highlights the importance of providing eye exams and eyeglasses to underserved children, their parents, and those in shelters, refugee camps, and Native American reservations. Early testing and glasses with the correct prescription can significantly impact academic performance, confidence, and social skills. Making wearing glasses cool and offering a wide selection of frames is key to encouraging everyone to wear them proudly. The EyeCare4Kids partners with various organizations to operate brick-and-mortar and mobile clinics in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, and Africa with expansion plans. Maggie explains, "I think glasses are cool these days, but the kids have to wear their glasses. So something that we do, and I love that we do this, we don't just give them a selection of five or six glasses. They get hundreds to choose from because we know that if they feel good about what they're wearing, they will wear them. And so I just got a message from a nurse the other day telling me she has been so happy seeing these students proudly wearing their glasses. They absolutely love them, and they show them off. They tell their friends about them." "There are a lot of barriers. There are parents who are working, and in many of the homes just here in the US, both parents are working, so there's just no time. They don't want to take them out of school. I think there's just a lot of different reasons. I think there needs to be more education for parents to be able to notice the signs. Maybe kids have behavioral problems in the classroom that are often misdiagnosed. A kid sitting at the back of the classroom who isn't able to see the PowerPoint or the board is probably just unable to focus because they can't see clearly." "For example, our team was dispensed at an elementary school. There was a first grader who put on his pair of glasses, his first pair of glasses, and he had a significant prescription, and there was a brick wall right next to him. He was just amazed at the brick wall and that it had texture, and he just kept feeling it and talking about it. Then he looked at the school staff and was like, I can see your face. And they were just so amazed at the different details he could see."    #ChildrensVisionCare #PediatricVisionCare #Glasses4Kids #EyeGlasses EyeCare4Kids.org Download the transcript here