Empowered Patient Podcast

Eric Olson, COO and Founder of BetterWay™ by Babson Diagnostics™, reports that traditional blood testing is often seen as inconvenient and unpleasant, causing 40% of people to avoid needed blood tests. Babson has developed a more patient-friendly approach to blood collection using a device that fits on the finger and requires a minimum amount of blood. The BetterWay service allows patients or doctors to order tests where blood is drawn at a local pharmacy and samples analyzed at a central lab, providing a quick turnaround with understandable test results. Eric explains, "Blood testing is something that most people are very familiar with. It's a routine part of medical care. Every time you go in for your annual visit or if you're monitoring a disease, maybe a chronic disease, you might get tested more frequently than once a year. The experience is something that a lot of people go through, which consists of having an appointment, going into some sort of patient service center, and getting blood drawn by a professional phlebotomist. They put a needle in your vein and use tubes to pull the blood out of the vein. They fill up multiple tubes of blood that get sent to a high-throughput laboratory that looks a bit like a factory for testing." "If you go to BetterWay.com, you can see the full menu and the prices of all the tests on that menu, so there are no surprise bills. Insurance, FSA, and HSA are accepted. However, the cash pay prices are often lower than many people pay, even with insurance, due to copays and deductibles, which are very high for many people." "So once you've got an order, you go to your local retail pharmacy to get your blood collected. We're available in pharmacies in Austin today, on all sides of Austin, and expanding beyond Austin soon. Once you arrive at the pharmacy, you tell them that you're there for the BetterWay test. They'll collect a pea-sized blood sample from your fingertip after putting your hand on a hand warmer. And that enables them to collect either one or two tubes of blood, depending on the tests you've ordered, instead of large vials of blood from a needle in your vein." #BetterWay #BabsonDiagnostics #BloodTesting #HealthEcosystem #MedicalDeviceDevelopments BetterWay.com Download the transcript here

Marylyn Rigby, President and CEO of Bioceptive, focuses on improving women's health technologies. Bioceptive has developed a cervical suction retractor as an alternative to the 200-year-old cervical tenaculum device used to insert IUDs and perform biopsies and other intrauterine procedures. While current procedures are extremely painful, there has been a lack of innovation in understanding women's pain because women are often described as hysterical, with little clinical data to get to the source of the pain. Marylyn explains, "I think that also has to do with what modern medicine is based on, which is a man's body and not a woman's body. And because of that, it's kind of interesting to think that a man could ever possibly understand what it would feel like to have their cervix, which they don't even have, be pierced, essentially. It is like having your ears pierced and the traumatic experience that it causes because this is done again without any type of anesthetic. So, one of the biggest issues that we see right now, regardless of what your political stance on pro-life or pro-choice, is certainly that women need better options for contraception that are more effective." "Science has indicated that the IUD is the most effective form of contraception and that is because of its efficacy, which is greater than 99%. You're not looking to remember to take a pill. You're not looking, you're not having to have weight gain by having something inserted in your arm. It's a one-stop shop that is incredibly effective and cost-effective. However, the number one reason that women do not get IUDs more often is because of the trauma and the pain that is associated with the tenaculum, which is required to insert the IUD." #WomensHealth #Gynecology #FemTech #ReproductiveRights #ReproductiveHealth #WomensRights bioceptive.com Download the transcript here

Greg Sturmer, Co-Founder and CEO of Elysium Therapeutics, a company with expertise in reducing pain and addressing opioid use disorder and fatal overdose from fentanyl. Elysium has developed O2P, Oral Overdose Protection, a technology that aims to control the impact of opioids and reduce the risk of use disorder or a fatal overdose. SOOPR is a rescue agent designed specifically for overdoses from synthetic opioids, particularly fentanyl, which can last longer and be more potent than traditional opioids. Greg explains, "Anytime there's an epidemic, you want to control exposure. The tricky bit in the area of pain management and the use of opioids is how do you control exposure without affecting patient care. We've come up with a technology that maintains the unmatched efficacy of the opioids. But when somebody takes too many pills, and we've actually shown this in our human study, we can reduce the exposure because we use this proprietary molecular delivery system that uses the body's natural digestive process to control how much of the opioid gets released. That's how we're addressing the front end of the issue, where somebody is prescribed an opioid." "But sadly, what happens today is several individuals progress along the road to opioid use disorder, and they end up using illicit drugs. That's where our second program, SOOPR, comes into play. As you know, our streets in the US have been flooded with fentanyl. Fentanyl is a highly potent opioid. The cartels have gotten very wise in how to expand their market. They introduced fentanyl-laced pills because a lot more people are willing to take pills rather than inject. Well, that changed the game dramatically because when somebody overdoses orally on fentanyl, that puts them at risk of respiratory depression for hours where they stop breathing." "Existing rescue agents like Narcan and Opvee weren't designed for oral synthetic opioids and overdoses of those drugs. ‎SOOPR, we believe, is the first rescue agent designed specifically for synthetic opioids. What it does is it outlasts that synthetic opioid danger zone, blocking the mu-opioid receptors and preventing that respiratory depression or rescuing somebody who's already in respiratory depression." #ElysiumTherapeutics #Opioids #OpioidAbuse #SyntheticOpioids #OpioidUseDisorder #PainManagement #SaferMedicines Elysiumrx.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Boris Reznik, Chairman and CEO of Immorta Bio, was founded to explore longevity and life extension technologies inspired by the discovery that aged cells can be reprogrammed to become younger ones. The company has a cellular rejuvenation platform that uses the patient's cells and senolytic immunotherapy to help the immune system target and remove senescent cells. These approaches aim to leverage the body's natural mechanism for maintaining health and extending the healthspan, not just lifespan. Boris explains, "First of all, let me just touch upon aging because aging perpetually happens on a cellular level from an early age because trillions of mutations occur in our cells every single day. But the young body's defense mechanism, such as the immune system and stem cells, effectively addresses those issues and keeps young people healthy. So everything we do is associated with the approach where we try to use young bodies' mechanisms in dealing with all diseases and all issues associated with aging." "As I said, young bodies have mechanisms, but all mechanisms which body uses, they have a tendency to deteriorate with age, and it starts all on cellular level. They progress from cells to tissues, from tissues to organs, from organs to systems, and, eventually, all of that results in a disease. And those diseases are what we call diseases of aging. So, actually, the disease of aging is just a specific stage of aging. So, what we created and what we focus on are the two fundamental areas of longevity technologies." #ImmortaBio #Longevity #StemCells #Cancer #Aging #Rejuvenation immortabio.com Download the transcript here

Randy Boldyga is the CEO, President, and Founder of RXNT, which provides electronic medical records, electronic prescribing, and practice management products. One primary focus is improving patient charts using AI tools to enable providers to communicate with patients more efficiently and effectively. Using predictive analytics and virtual health assistants, this approach can improve patient outcomes by making healthcare more personalized and proactive. Randy explains, "There are things like enhanced diagnostics, in which AI can analyze medical images such as X-rays and MRIs with high accuracy, and personalized medicine, where AI can process and interpret genetic information, helping to tailor treatments to individual patients. There are predictive analytics, operational efficiencies such as AI, and streamlining administrative tasks for their office, such as scheduling, billing, and managing patient records." "There's virtual health assistance where AI-powered chatbots and individual assistance can help with appointment scheduling and offer medication reminders, improving patient engagement and adherence. There's robotic surgery, drug discovery and development, remote monitoring, enhanced patient records, and training and education. So those are all areas where AI has the potential to make healthcare more personalized, efficient, and proactive, leading to better patient outcomes in a more streamlined system." #RXNT #PatientCharts #MedAI #PersonalizedMedicine #AI #MedTech RXNT.com Download the transcript here

Joseph Mossel, CEO and Co-Founder of Ibex Medical Analytics is developing AI-based cancer diagnostic technology to help pathologists work faster and more accurately with tissue samples. This technology is being widely adopted as an artificial pathologist that can perform tasks more efficiently and aid the pathologist in reducing error rates, which is ever more important with the shortage of pathologists and increasing demand. Partnering with pharma companies, this technology has the potential to develop algorithms that can help determine the effectiveness of specific cancer drugs, expanding the application of AI beyond improving diagnostic accuracy. Joseph explains, "Pathology labs know how to receive a biopsy and a tissue sample and then convert it into a slide. Then, it is diagnosed by the pathologist. Our technology, not only does it help the pathologist to do their work faster, but it also is embedded within the lab workflow. You can think of the lab as the kind of a factory here, and we help all of that to be more efficient and faster. In some cases, we can actually cut down the time to diagnosis by even a few days." "Many studies that we've run with pathologists found that using our AI is better than just the AI and better than pathologists not using the AI. And you'll ask soon better by how much. That depends on the specific pathologists and the lab. But we've seen good labs with an error rate of around 2% to 3%. And by error, I mean really missing a cancer diagnosis, so diagnosing a cancerous case as benign. And then the absolute worst we've ever seen was a lab where 20% of the cases were misdiagnosed, which was a bit shocking. With a pathologist using our algorithm, the advantage of the two working together is that the algorithm and the pathologist tend to make different mistakes. Working together, we get to a level where there's maybe a handful of mistakes in every 10,000 cases." #IbexMedicalAnalytics #CancerDiagnostics #Cancer #DigitalPathology #Pathology #AI #AIinPathology #PatientOutcomes ibex-ai.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Chris Heery is Chief Medical Officer at Arcellx, a company focusing on developing anito-cel, a significant advancement in CAR-T cell therapy, to treat relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma (rrMM). Multiple myeloma is a rare type of blood cancer that affects plasma cells in the bone marrow and has few treatment options. Arcellx is showing promising data from clinical trials with patients with rrMM who have failed prior therapies and have received Fast Track, Orphan Drug, and Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy Designations from the FDA for anito-cel. Chris explains, "The company was founded based on an idea that you could take a novel protein structure and modify it to be able to bind to targets on the surface of cancer cells. And over many years of work, the founders were able to demonstrate that that was possible. Over the last three or four years, Arcellx has focused more on taking what were some of those early ideas and turning them into a product that can help patients. For these last three or four years, most of our focus has been around the lead asset that we call anito-cel that treats multiple myeloma and trying to get that product through the approval process to be able to be a commercial product that can be used for patients both in the United States and the rest of the world." "When a patient is diagnosed with multiple myeloma, in general, most patients are older. The median age of diagnosis of multiple myeloma is around 70 years old, and those plasma cells can cause damage to the normal bone marrow by crowding out the normal bone marrow." "They can also make a lot of the protein that a normal plasma cell would make. By making a lot of that protein, those proteins can cause deposition and damage into other tissues. So, patients can arrive at the clinic with a variety of different symptoms that have to do with either decreased bone marrow activity, decreased number of normal cell populations in their blood, or damage to things like their kidneys or other end organs that you need for normal human function." #Arcellx #CellTherapy #CARTTherapy #RRMM #MultipleMyeloma #BloodCancer #Cancer #RareDisease arcellx.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Mohammed Elamir, lead physician at Aviv Clinics, offers diagnostics and treatments for brain injuries such as PTSD, stroke, and traumatic brain injury and to address cognitive decline. After comprehensive physical and mental assessment, including brain scans, patients receive hyperbaric oxygen therapy and other therapies like psychotherapy and neurocognitive training. Individualized plans are designed to get to the root causes of neurological and cognitive issues and stimulate the growth of new cells and blood flow, even for patients with long-standing conditions. Dr. Mo explains, "Our pre-assessment testing is a lot more rigorous than your kind of annual physical. We do three to five days of testing that can involve medical evaluations with the medical doctors and advanced blood work for different biomarkers for injury or inflammation. Two very specific brain scans that I think separate our assessment from most, and one is an MRI with DTI analysis. That is a microstructure analysis of the brain. So we can look at the nerve tracks running through the brain, how well-connected, and how dense they are." "If somebody's approved for the treatment, they would undergo up to a 12-week treatment regimen involving hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And we can go into the details of that oxygen therapy, but in addition to that, they'll have other appointments, whether it's PT, psychological counseling, or neurocognitive training. And by the end of the 12 weeks, they should be feeling better, but objectively, we want to see why. We repeat the entire pre-treatment assessment at the end so we can have an objective comparison." #AvivClinics #HBOT #HyperbaricMedicine #PTSD #Stoke #Aging Aviv-Clinics.com Download the transcript here

Tomer Shussman, the Co-Founder and CEO of OneStep, is at the forefront of motion intelligence and gait analysis. OneStep provides a smartphone app that monitors movement and provides real-time data about gait patterns and changes over time. The system can predict and prevent conditions like falls, provide information about overall health, and reveal early warning signs for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and other aging-related diseases. Integrating OneStep's gait analysis data with Epic electronic health records allows healthcare providers to streamline documentation and leverage gait data to provide immediate actionable feedback to patients. Tomer explains, "When we started OneStep, we started with physical therapy and rehabilitation, particularly after knee replacements, hip replacements, and injuries of all kinds. But since then, we now have customers and partners who work with us on fall prevention, essentially identifying and quantifying the risk of falling through gait analysis. Our partners work with us on using gait as a biofeedback tool for dosing the level of chemotherapy." "We recently launched a cognitive decline score that measures and quantifies the cognitive impact on gait in cases like Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, ALS, and dementia by looking at the differences between conscious and unconscious gait. And this is just scratching the surface. These are all things that are already commercialized. We have so much more in the pipeline that we're currently researching." "What we've been able to add to it is that we have customers and partners conducting a Timed Up and Go Test through OneStep. What we've been able to add to it from a clinical perspective is parameters like the base width - is the patient walking on a very wide base or a very narrow base, the step length, and the step length asymmetry." #OneStep #GaitAnalysis #FallPrevention #Gait #RTM #RemoteTherapeuticMonitoring #SeniorLivingFacilities OneStep.co Download the transcript here

Dr. Sherif Idriss is the CEO of Elastin Biosciences, a company focused on targeting aging-related diseases by restoring elastin, a key protein in the extracellular matrix that provides elasticity and resilience to organs and tissues. They are developing small molecule therapies for diseases linked to elastin deficiency, including Williams syndrome and abdominal aortic aneurysm. As elastin degrades over time due to aging, it leads to loss of tissue structural integrity and function, contributing to numerous age-related diseases. Sherif explains, "One of the hallmarks of aging is the loss of the extracellular matrix, which is composed of several proteins. Collagen is quite famous, but also elastin is the other major protein that is responsible for the elasticity of the different organs. For example, in our skin, the loss of elastin is associated with us looking older and having all the aging signs and wrinkles on the skin. If you imagine that there are other organs inside that we don't visually see, then you have also the blood vessels, the lungs, a lot of the connective tissue. The extracellular matrix proteins and elastin itself are also aging in the same way and have their own form of damage one way or another. All of this contributes to aging and aging-related diseases as well." "Another kind of disease is the category of rare diseases. In this case, we aim to target Williams syndrome, a rare disease characterized by a genetic partial deletion of around 26 genes. One of these genes is elastin itself, so some genetic material is still there, but there is not enough. We would like to try to push the elastin production up in Williams syndrome, and this would help rectify a lot of the disease issues, particularly when it comes to the cardiovascular system because Williams syndrome patients have quite a lot of issues with the cardiovascular system from birth and all through life." #ElastinBiosciences #Aging #AgingRelatedDiseases #Elastin #WilliamsSyndrome elastin-biosciences.com Download the transcript here