Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Gil Van Bokkelen, founder and CEO, Athersys a clinical stage biotech company, talks about developing cell therapies and regenerative medicine as alternatives to conventional standards of medical intervention and treatment using their MultiStem cell therapy platform.  Gil explains how cell therapies work by providing multi-dimensional solutions and how regenerative medicine therapies differ from traditional pharmaceuticals or biologics designed to do one very specific thing.  He also talks about how MultiStem has shown dramatic impact on stroke victims and on acute respiratory distress syndrome and inflammation in the lungs and their related work with lung transplant centers. @Athersys #regenerativemedicine #ARDS Athersys.com Download the transcript here

Jack Stover, CEO, Interpace Biosciences describes the changing landscape of drug development with the introduction of genetic data, creation of advanced diagnostic tests for pancreatic, thyroid, lung and esophageal cancers, and the resulting implications for treatment plans.  He also explains their work with big pharma companies in the area of immuno-oncology to determine potential partnerships with other drug candidates. @InterpaceBIO #IDXG #immunooncology #cancer Interpace.com Download the transcript here

David Johnson, CEO and co-founder, GigaGen discusses the company's recombinant intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) therapy in development to treat patients with primary immune deficiencies and its potential to overcome limitations of current IVIG plasma-based therapies.  David describes how GigaGen's recombinant IVIG is not tied to plasma supplies and has the potential to provide a high purity, consistent and ultimately safer treatment alternative for patients in need. #primaryimmunedeficiency #IVIG #antibody #PolyclonalAntibodies @GigaGeninc GigaGen.com Download the entire transcript here Page 1 of the Interview with David Johnson GigaGen Karen Jagoda: Welcome to the EmpoweredPatientPodcast.com show. I'm Karen Jagoda, and my guest today is David Johnson. He's the CEO and co-founder of GigaGen, that's G-I-G-A G-E-N.com. And Dave is an inventor, he's an entrepreneur and is an expert in single cell immunology. And we're talking today about IVIG therapies for patients with primary immune deficiencies. And Dave, I want to welcome you to the show today. I really appreciate you taking a few minutes. David Johnson: Thank you. Happy to be here. Karen Jagoda: So let's start off by just explaining what IVIG is and how medications are made up that are in this form. David Johnson: IVIG currently is derived from plasma of human donors. So what happens is thousands of plasma donors go into collection facilities and the facilities collect plasma from these individuals, and then pools of these donors' plasma get subjected to a manufacturing process where antibodies are extracted from the plasma. And believe it or not, this is actually a drug that's given to patients who have immune deficiencies. And what that means is that these are people who can't make enough antibody or don't make the right kinds of antibodies and therefore need these supplements from the plasma of these donors. Karen Jagoda: And so why are these therapies so important? People can't get the same benefit from taking some kind of pill? David Johnson: No. Well, if you think about it, this is a chronic disease. And so people have this for their entire lives. Most people get diagnosed in their 20s or maybe 30s. And the only other real alternative is to take antibiotics, for example Cipro, for the rest of your life. And as you could imagine, if you take Cipro, it's fairly toxic, and also eventually you get resistant bacteria, actually pretty quickly. So doctors really have no other choice right now but to use these IVIG therapies. Karen Jagoda: So part of the reason it's interesting to talk to you is not only the work that you're doing to change the world of IVIG, but also there's a shortage of traditional IVIG therapies across the country. So first, tell us a little bit about why there's a shortage and then how your therapy is aiming to overcome those kind of shortages in the future. David Johnson: Yeah, as you can imagine, people are busy and it can be difficult to get donors to go into the collection facilities to donate plasma. You get some financial reimbursement for going and donating, but it can be really difficult to collect enough plasma to create enough antibody that would meet the demand. Another issue is that outside of the US, it can be difficult to collect plasma sometimes because of infectious disease outbreaks. For example, China has difficulty collecting plasma. You can imagine with the coronavirus outbreak, it's going to be even more difficult. Then some places in Europe you can't give people any compensation for plasma donations, so that makes it harder to collect. So all around, there's growing demand for IVIG products, but not really growing plasma supply. So it's a big problem that, somehow it needs to be solved one way or another. Download the entire transcript.

Dan Passeri, CEO, Cue Biopharma discusses their proprietary Immuno-STAT(TM) platform.  Cue Biopharma is engineering a novel class of injectable biologics to selectively engage and modulate targeted T cells within the body to transform the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases.  The platform is designed to harness the body's intrinsic immune system response without the need for ex vivo manipulation.  Cue is currently conducting a Phase 1 study in HPV16-driven head and neck cancer and partnering with Merck to develop treatments for autoimmune diseases. #immunooncology #HNSCC #TCells @CueBiopharma CueBiopharma.com Download the entire transcript here Page 1 of Transcript Karen Jagoda: Welcome to the empoweredpatientpodcast.com show. I'm Karen Jagoda, and my guest today is Dan Passeri. He's the CEO of Cue Biopharma. That's cuebiopharma.com. And I recently talked with Anish Suri, who is the Chief Scientific Officer at Cue, and I thought it was such an interesting story that I thought it was also a good idea to get the CEO of the company on the show to give us a little bit of an update and perhaps a little bit more in the way of details. So welcome to the show today, Dan. Dan Passeri: Thanks, Karen. Appreciate it. Karen Jagoda: So let's just talk a little bit about where Cue fits into the landscape of immuno-oncology companies. Dan Passeri: Sure. Immuno-oncology is obviously a very broad, encompassing category, and what it really covers is any approach that is meant to stimulate the immune system in some manner, that is meant to have clinical activity against cancer. And there's a myriad of approaches, but ultimately, no matter what approach is being taken, the objective is to stimulate the effective components of the immune system that can identify and attack cancer. Dan Passeri: What we do is actually quite distinctive in that the majority of approaches have tried to stimulate T-cells in various ways by taking them out of the body, for instance. And we've all heard of all these various cell therapy approaches, CAR T being the best publicized and characterized. And that's where you're taking T-cells out of the patient, you're genetically altering them to have a particular receptor that recognizes cancer, and infusing them back in. Dan Passeri: There are also cell therapy approaches where they take the cells out and use particular proteins that are represented on cancer, and then those T-cells will recognize that protein, and they use something called IL-2, Interleukin-2. It's an approved drug called proleukin, and they'll stimulate the T-cells, and then they infuse them back into the body. Dan Passeri: What we're doing is quite a different approach, and we believe it's a transformative approach in that we are using a biologic engineering category to stimulate T-cells directly in the patient's body. So it basically removes the need for having to extract T-cells out of the patient and the cumbersome manipulations, and we believe what we'll have is a potential breakthrough in the space where we can use our biologic to engage the desired T-cells. Now, that is only those T-cells that will recognize the protein on the cancer, activate those T-cells, and make many copies of them so that they then will identify the tumor cells, attack them, and destroy them. So that's the broad overview of what we're doing.

Dr. Arnold Saperstein, Chief Medical Officer, Cecelia Health talks about how they are empowering diabetics to manage their disease as well as overall healthcare using personalized human to human coaching based on an individual's background, age and specific needs.  Their mission is to address challenges of medication compliance, insuring patients understand the role of diet and nutrition, and working with patients to remove barriers to the effective use of technology to help control their conditions. @CeceliaHealth #diabetes #mobilehealth CeceliaHealth.com Download the transcript here

Kinnari Patel, Chief Operating Officer, Rocket Pharmaceuticals discusses how Rocket is focused on creating new options for patients contending with rare genetic diseases.  Rocket is advancing several gene therapies for rare pediatric diseases and Kinnari provides insights into how the company is tackling the unique challenges facing patients with rare diseases, their caregivers and the community at large.  This February 29th Rocket Pharma is hosting a Rare Disease Day event featuring patient discussions and opportunities for patients and families to engage with physicians and researchers in the NY healthcare community. @RocketPharma #RareDiseaseDay #RareDiseases #GeneticDisease #GeneTherapy #FanconiAnemia #DanonDisease #PatientFocused RocketPharma.com Download the transcript here

Renee Ryan, CEO, Cala Health talks about the focus of Cala on using electricity as medicine by developing wearable electronics to treat tremors in the hands of essential tremor patients.  Using neuromodulation technology, they have developed a device that includes a stimulator and a signal that is sent across two nerves in the wrist to read the frequency of the tremors and allow the patient to reduce tremors on demand. @calahealth #mobilehealth #essentialtremors #neuromodulation Cala Health Download the transcript here  

James Brown DVM, CEO, DURECT Corporation talks about how DURECT is advancing epigenetic therapies to treat alcoholic hepatitis and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).  The company's lead asset, DUR-928 has demonstrated promising therapeutic potential treating patients with alcoholic hepatitis, a life-threatening acute liver disease caused by chronic alcohol abuse with no approved drugs for treatment.  Dr. Brown also talks about his background as a doctor of veterinary medicine and his goal to continue developing medicines that improve the lives of others. #AlcoholicHepatits #Epigenetic #NASH #LiverDisease DURECT.com Download the transcript here

Maria Picone, co-founder TREND.Community and Antonio Maltese, student with Huntington's Disease talk about the challenges of finding valid information about rare diseases, the value of community support in discovering novel approaches to treatments, providing evidence to pharmaceutical companies about little understood symptoms, and advocating for awareness about rare diseases particularly during Rare Disease week and Rare Disease Day February 29. #rarediseases #huntingtonsdisease HopeForHuntingtons.com TREND.Community Download the transcript here  

Brad Margus, CEO, Cerevance talks about discovering and developing novel therapies for central nervous system diseases using the Cerevance powerful NETSseq target discovery platform and their large collection of human brain tissue samples.  Brad explains why the brain is such a challenging organ to study and their efforts to understand brain cell loss in such diseases as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. #brain #CNSdisorders #Parkinsons #Alzheimers #NETSseq Cevevance.com Download the transcript here