

Empowered Patient Podcast
Karen Jagoda
Empowered Patient Podcast with Karen Jagoda is a window into the latest innovations in digital health, the changing dynamic between doctors and patients, and the emergence of precision medicine. The show covers such topics as aging in place, innovative uses for wearables and sensors, advances in clinical research, applied genetics, drug development, and challenges for connected health entrepreneurs.
Episodes
Mentioned books

May 15, 2024 • 20min
Developing Drug Targeting B Cells in Autoimmune Disease of the Kidney IgA Nephropathy with Dr. Marshall Fordyce Vera Therapeutics
Dr. Marshall Fordyce, CEO and Founder of Vera Therapeutics, discusses the company's patient-centric approach to developing new medicines for autoimmune diseases. Vera is currently in Phase 3 with a molecule called Atacicept, which targets B cells in autoimmune diseases. They focus on IgA nephropathy, a rare kidney disease, and the third most common cause of kidney failure. A key concern is that declining kidney function is often misdiagnosed and not screened for because the early warning signs are so subtle. Marshall explains, "Let me give you an example of our lead indication. So, our molecule in development is called atacicept. It targets the immune system in the specific area of B cells, and B cells are the factories of our antibodies, which we need to fight infection over our lifetime. But in patients with autoimmune disease, these B cells are overstimulated, they're overactive, and there are only a few medicines that target B cells with an appropriate balance of safety and efficacy. We had an insight that the science told us that by inhibiting two key factors in the body, BAFF and APRIL, we could normalize that overactivity of B cells and have better outcomes." "Now traditional drug development may be long and expensive. We were very strategic in picking IgA nephropathy. This is an area that has had very little drug development over the last decade. A few small companies started to become interested in this area, and thankfully, because of patient advocacy, the FDA allowed a surrogate endpoint in Phase 3 trials, which made it more efficient to bring this molecule forward. So, there are now two drugs on the market for the first time in the last three or four years, for two new drugs in IgA nephropathy. They don't target B cells, which is really what's driving this disease. They work downstream, or they're nonspecific." "What Vera did differently is that we thought that we could actually demonstrate that kidney function, which in these young patients is declining at an alarming rate, if we could demonstrate that kidney function doesn't decline, that would be meaningful. It would be a significant leap. We don't see that happen in "traditional" drug development often, in my view. So, I think what's different here is that we're picking an area where we think we can intervene and, in early-stage development, show a meaningful improvement in outcomes for patients." #VeraTherapeutics #KidneyDisease #RareDisease #BCells #Immunotherapy #AutoimmuneDiseases #IgANephropathy veratx.com Download the transcript here

May 14, 2024 • 19min
Developing Drugs to Treat Rare Liver Diseases NASH PBC ACLF with Pascal Prigent GENFIT
Pascal Prigent, the CEO of GENFIT, a French biotech that has been working on liver diseases for about 20 years and has developed a compound called elafibranor for conditions such as primary biliary cholangitis (PBC). The company is also developing assets in acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF). He highlights the high unmet medical need in ACLF, which currently has no approved treatment options and a high mortality rate. Prigent also discusses Genfit's partnership with Ipsen for the development and commercialization of elafibranor in PBC. Pascal explains, "In reality, we don't have any approved option in ACLF, which is actually quite dramatic because you have a high mortality rate. To give you a little bit of context, people are suffering from chronic liver disease, regardless of the etiology. It can be too much alcohol consumption, it could be NASH, it could be viral hepatitis. Any kind of chronic liver disease will give us all the same journey, if you will." "First, you have an injury to the liver. Then you have a progressive liver scar. You have the setup of fibrosis, that fibrosis becomes worse and worse. It becomes bridging fibrosis, but at some point, it will become cirrhosis. And that cirrhosis is first compensated, and then one day it can decompensate, and on that already failing organ, you have a precipitating factor." "That precipitating factor could be an infection, binge-drinking, or drug-induced trauma. That stress on an already sick organ will get the liver to decompensate, and that decompensation of the liver will trigger additional organ decomposition, and that's what ACLF is. It's a syndrome at the very end of chronic liver diseases." #GENFIT #LiverDisease #NASH #PBC #ACLF #LiverFailure #Hepatitis #ChronicLiverDisease #RareDisease GENFIT.com Download the transcript here

May 13, 2024 • 18min
Research Set to Expand as Federal Government Considers Rescheduling Cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III with Phil Johnston Johnston Associates
Phil Johnston, President and CEO of Johnston Associates, and an advisor to EO Care, the market leader in providing clinically-guided cannabis use. Phil discusses the potential for research from the reclassification of cannabis from a Schedule I drug to a Schedule III drug. With current Federal restrictions on cannabis, research has not been conducted on the potential therapeutic use for pain relief, depression, PTSD, and other conditions. With a change in classification, researchers can develop protocols, test different cannabis strains, run clinical trials, and determine dosage and form for therapies. Phil explains, "So changing the Schedule from I to III is a game-changer because it's going to allow for research in the cannabis area in terms of dosage, what's the appropriate dosage, what kind of marijuana should be used for whatever ails you. There's a particular emphasis, of course, on pain relief and sleeplessness and depression. It appears that cannabis can have a very serious positive impact on those maladies, but we need much more research, and that's where we come in. That's what we're trying to focus on with EO Care." "If you talk to any MD in the country, they'll tell you that they didn't learn anything about cannabis in medical school, and that was because of the Federal ban. And so there hasn't been a lot of research done. It's anecdotal at this point, such as my wife's situation, and what we need is for the Federal Government and the states to lead the way to make sure that there's funding for research and that medical schools are including that in their curricula. The research will involve what normally is involved with drugs, which is trials to determine exactly what the best treatments would be." "Dosing is very important to figure out how much of it one needs, given whatever the specific problem is. And none of that research has been done in this country yet. Now, we're doing a sweep of international studies. It turns out that Canada, which legalized this a long time ago, has done trials and has some research, which we can adapt. However, that work has to be done, and it has to be done within medical institutions in the United States as well." #MedicalCannabisAccessibility #MedicalCannabisClinicalResearch #MedicalCannabisCancerPatients #CannabisRescheduling #FutureofMedicalCannabis PWJohnston.com EOCare.com Download the transcript here

May 8, 2024 • 18min
Preventative and Acute Treatment for Rare Genetic Disease HAE with Salome Juethner Takeda
Salome Juethner, Senior Medical Director, Head of Rare Genetics, and Interim Head of Rare GI at Takeda, discusses HAE, hereditary angioedema, a rare genetic disorder that causes painful and unpredictable swelling attacks that can be life-threatening. Salome emphasizes the need to educate physicians to consider HAE as a potential diagnosis in children as young as two years old and underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. To treat HAE, Takeda offers Takhzyro, a medication that can be used on-demand and as a preventative therapy, administered at home through a subcutaneous injection. Salome explains, "Hereditary angioedema, or HAE, is a rare genetic disorder with a prevalence of one in 50,000. It can cause very painful, unpredictable swelling attacks that can occur in the throat, abdomen, hands, feet, and face. And as you can imagine, a throat attack could be potentially life-threatening. There are different triggers for these attacks. Some can just be stress and that could be positive stress like a wedding or going to prom or an illness and others. It can be quite limiting when you have to live thinking if I do something, is that going to trigger an attack? The symptoms can change over time, and HAE may not necessarily look the same for each person. Typically, people with HAE are missing an important protein in their blood called a C1 inhibitor. Either they're missing it or have very low levels, and it just may not work the way it should." "For people who have never heard of HAE, things get a lot more difficult because they rely on their physician, who may or may not be aware of this very rare disease and consider it part of the differential diagnosis. So it is not uncommon to hear patients talk about going for years before they ever got their diagnosis and that they were experiencing symptoms during that time, going to the emergency room, and maybe even being misdiagnosed with another condition until they finally saw someone who thought, oh, you know what? We should screen you for HAE." "Screening is really just a blood test. So, you would screen for a C4 level, which would be low or normal. If you're thinking about whether this could be HAE, then you would go ahead and check a C1 inhibitor level and a functional C1 level, and then those would be low as well. It's really about educating people, though, to consider it as part of the differential diagnosis." #Takeda #HAE #HereditaryAngioedema #RareDisease takeda.com Download the transcript here

May 7, 2024 • 22min
Enhancing Patient Engagement and Collaboration with Healthcare Providers with Lorie Spence and Carolyn Pritchard Bridge Medical Communications
Lorie Spence and Carolyn Pritchard, Co-Founders of Bridge Medical Communications, focus on developing tools and resources to support healthcare professionals and patients in collaborating and making informed treatment decisions. They emphasize the importance of patient-centered care, participatory medicine, and patient engagement to help address therapeutic challenges and barriers that impact patient outcomes. By applying healthcare communication strategies and providing practical and functional tools for use at the point of care, they are bridging the gap between providers and patients. Lorie explains, "Some tools we developed through Bridge Medical Communications through CONNECT really support healthcare professionals at the point of care. With the dynamic shift in the marketplace, with precision medicine and the need to engage the multidisciplinary team, we've developed tools like flow sheets that can be integrated into the EMRs to help assist and prompt through the steps of care from assessment of all the way to therapeutic onboarding and management." Carolyn elaborates, "Connecting is ensuring that the patient's voice and that the patient is, as you mentioned, participating in their healthcare journey. So we're trying to support industry and stakeholders in developing these tools so they can collaborate with the patients. As we've mentioned, it might be a patient counseling tool, like a transition tool, these types of things provide continuity of care critical between the patient, the healthcare provider, and often, caregivers." #BridgeMedComms #PatientsVoice #PatientCentric #HealthcareProfessionals #ParticipatoryMedicine #HealthcareCommunications bridgemedcomms.ca Download the transcript here

May 6, 2024 • 20min
Patient Selection Strategies Based on Tumor Microenvironment to Determine Appropriate Immuno-Oncology Therapies with John Celebi Sensei Biotherapeutics
John Celebi, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Sensei Biotherapeutics, emphasizes the need to develop better patient selection strategies and next-generation therapeutics for cancer patients. Through their Tumor Microenvironment-Activated Biologics platform (TMAb), Sensei develops conditionally active therapeutics designed to be active only within the low-pH tumor microenvironment. Current pipeline candidates are designed to be active only within the low-pH tumor microenvironment and show potential to overcome the challenges of VISTA, a promising checkpoint target. John explains, "As an industry, we have some tough choices. Other strategies, both within and outside of IO, have made much better progress in targeting which patients will respond and which patients won't respond to treatment. Those are decisions that we have to make as an industry to keep up." "The second one I would point to is that we're now in a decade after the first immuno-oncology drug approval. And so, we have a whole generation of patients now that have been exposed to checkpoint therapy, and that are now many of whom resistant to checkpoint therapy. We call that acquired resistance. And so the game has really changed. It's an open question: whether the first PD-1 drugs would be approved today if all of those patients had been treated with some other checkpoint therapy prior to it raises the bar. This means new strategies are needed to treat patients with acquired resistance to immunotherapy." "One of the interesting things about VISTA is that it does play a key role in the tumor microenvironment. The tumor microenvironment is unique because it's an environment inside the body in which cells proliferate very rapidly. That leads to a whole host of subsequent changes that affect the outcome of therapy, the fact that when cells are dividing rapidly, the pH in the area tends to drop, and it becomes more acidic. And that's directly related to the function of VISTA. It's one of the things that makes VISTA unique because VISTA is only activated as an immune checkpoint under lower pH conditions." #SenseiBio #ImmunOncology #PatientSelection #Immunotherapy #Cancer #Tumors #ImmuneCheckpointTargets #VISTA SenseiBio.com Download the transcript here

May 1, 2024 • 19min
Unlocking the Power of Behavioral Science for Healthcare Communications with William Hind Alpharmaxim
William Hind, agency principal at Alpharmaxim, highlights that traditional methods of educating patients and physicians may not effectively drive behavior change. Applying behavioral science in healthcare communications is a way to understand the barriers to adopting new medicines and therapies and patient and provider reluctance to change. Behavioral science will become increasingly helpful for the pharmaceutical and medical tech industries to ensure that novel therapies, wearable devices, and at-home diagnostic equipment are successfully marketed to the right patients at the right time with accurate information. William explains, "At present, there's a great deal of needed emphasis on educating people about diseases and any therapies that come forward. However, it may not be a lack of information inhibiting prescribing clinicians or patients from adopting a new medicine. It may be that it's an old habit of physicians, or it may be that the patients have accepted a regimen that they are reluctant to move away from. So it's about the need to try and discover all of the different aspects of what might be acting as a barrier in making sure that new medicines are adopted as quickly as possible." "When it comes to behavioral change, I don’t think people realize quite what a science it is. You know, it's firmly rooted in psychology and sociology. There is clear evidence supporting its use. We use the COM-B model, a well-reputed approach to defining barriers. This is interesting because pharmaceuticals, in particular, and patient communications are all heavily dependent on the data and evidence, yet the way they communicate is usually governed by habit. We're trying to encourage people to look at what's needed to shift behaviors instead of just relying on habitual communication." "There is a wealth of examples where behavior science is being used very successfully in consumer advertising and in the kinds of scenarios you mentioned. There's a lot of work in that area, but even there, real behavioral science is still on the fringes. It's not routinely adopted. So what we need to do is make sure that it is better understood. In pharmaceuticals, it isn't as adopted anywhere near as much as it should be or could be, especially given what's at stake." #Alpharmaxim #BehavioralScience #PharmaMarketing #Medtech alpharmaxim.com Download the transcript here

Apr 30, 2024 • 19min
Cardiometabolic Clinic Offers Virtual Comprehensive Personalized Healthcare with Dr. Avantika Waring 9amHealth
Dr. Avantika Waring, the Chief Medical Officer at 9amHealth, provides end-to-end individualized cardiometabolic care to people with diabetes, pre-diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and obesity. Their focus on metabolic health includes diagnostics, medications, nutrition services, coaching, and lifestyle support in a fun, engaging and non-judgemental manner. This comprehensive virtual healthcare model extends the opportunity for patients to get the support they need to manage these chronic conditions better. Avantika explains, "The mission behind our companies is to make high-quality, effective, and, importantly, kind care available to as many people as possible. We know that there are amazing clinicians out there, and there are patients who are super fortunate to be connected with them. But that's not everyone. There are a lot of barriers to getting access to that care, and we want to make sure that people can get access to the care that they need and that the experience is, might I say, as fun as possible for both the clinician and the patient." "We want things to be simple for patients, and we know that most people who have a cardiometabolic condition are likely to have more than one. Sometimes, two or three. So, our goal is to make the experience as simple and streamlined as possible for the members. So if they're coming to us with a glucose issue and need labs and medication for that, but they also need coaching on their diet for heart health and cholesterol, we want to offer them all that in one experience." #9amHealth #Diversity #Healthcare #HealthEquity #AsynchronousCare #CardiometabolicCare #MetabolicHealth #MedicationCosts2024 #EmployeeBenefits #DigitalHealth join9am.com Download the transcript here

Apr 29, 2024 • 19min
Diagnostic Potential of Preventative Whole-Body MRI Scans with Dr. John Simon SimonMed Imaging
Dr. John Simon, CEO and Founder of SimonMed Imaging makes various medical imaging technologies available, including X-rays, ultrasound, MRI, and PET/CT scans, which have traditionally been used for diagnosis and tracking changes. With the SimonONE whole-body MRI scan, SimonMed offers an affordable preventative screening approach that, with the assistance of AI and advancements in imaging technology, looks for abnormalities and detects subtle changes. Ideally, MRI scans will become more routine in annual exams to catch treatable conditions sooner. John elaborates, "About 20, 25 years ago, diagnostic imaging went from a very limited specialty within the hospital setting to an often-used technology. This great technology is used in the outpatient setting. So, I founded my first outpatient radiology office over 20 years ago, and it included some of the most advanced equipment you could obtain at that time, including cardiac CT and MRI scanners, which were incredibly fast for that time. What that technology enabled us to do was to do outpatient imaging studies very quickly, less expensively, and very accurately." "A whole-body MRI involves a series of MRI sequences, more than one, looking at the body. Typically, we look at the head, neck, chest, abdomen, and pelvis. We do specialized sequences within those areas looking for aneurysms, looking for vascular changes in the body, looking at the health of the brain for not only excluding particularly cancers in the brain, for example, but also looking for early signs of Alzheimer's disease. In the neck, we look for cancers as well as other abnormalities." "In the chest, abdomen, and pelvis, we not only look for vascular abnormalities but also for early signs of cancer and other abnormalities, including metabolic abnormalities within the liver. There is something called fatty liver disease, which is common in the US. So, the process involves a noninvasive MRI study with multiple different sequences looking at different areas within the body, and we put them all together in one visit." #SimonMedImaging #MRI #WholeBodyScan #Diagnostics #AI #MedicalImaging #PreventativeMedicine SimonMed.com Download the transcript here

Apr 25, 2024 • 18min
Combination Drug Targets Core Pathologies of ALS Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s with Alon Ben-Noon NeuroSense Therapeutics
Alon Ben-Noon, CEO and board member of NeuroSense Therapeutics, is taking a unique approach to treating neurodegenerative diseases by targeting core pathologies and combining molecules to address various mechanisms. NeuroSense has seen positive clinical trial results for ALS using their lead compound PrimeC, which showed a reduction in disease progression. Research indicates the potential for this approach to be applied to other neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Alon explains, "The main challenge is to find a therapeutic asset for a complex disease, which is still not understood well enough to date. ALS, also Alzheimer's, and I think that Parkinson's is among them as well. All of those neurodegenerative diseases are very complex and involve many mechanisms that go wrong. We try to tackle them with the therapeutic agents while we are not certain with each patient what exactly goes on. This is a huge challenge, so we need to be creative and find ways how we may be able to provide benefits to the majority of the patients, and I should be more distinct to say a benefit to some extent." "In order to maximize the success with our therapy, we figured out that we need to target more than just one single mechanism and we need to tackle as much as we can or as many as we can. And looking at the more pertinent targets in our view and our understanding, we combine two molecules that target several mechanisms in a synergistic manner. We found molecules that can target these pathological pathways that were identified from the start. Also, it was important for us to see that they can work synergistically together on these targets." #NeuroSense #ALS #Parkinsons #Alzheimers #NeurodegenerativeDiseases NeuroSense-TX.com Download the transcript here