Empowered Patient Podcast

Anthony Mack, CEO of Virpax Pharma, is developing non-addictive pain drugs focusing on repurposing existing molecules and improving the delivery platform to enhance bioavailability and sustained delivery. With an initial focus on postoperative pain management and preventing opioid tolerance, their product, Probudur, is a long-lasting local anesthetic for sustained pain control. The asset Envelta uses a molecular envelope technology to protect enkephalin as it passes through the blood-brain barrier to attach to delta receptors in the brain to control pain. Anthony explains, "Now, in the case of the enkephalin asset, as far as tolerance is concerned, we have a product that isn't enkephalin. It's a peptide, and peptides are endogenous materials already in our bodies. Now, we can't generate enough to have pain control, so it would be nice if we could administer them. If an enkephalin can get past the blood-brain barrier, it attaches to the brain's delta receptors. There are immune receptors in the brain, too, that everybody's familiar with because they know morphine, oxycodone, Oxycontin, hydrocodone, and Vicodin. They know these actives, but the problem is that when they attach to these mu receptors, there is a potential for respiratory depression, drug-seeking behavior, and intolerance." "Yes, that is a great collaboration we have. It's an open, what we call CRADA, or some people may call it an in-kind grant, but it's a cooperation agreement for all of our pain assets, including Envelta. But we started with the Probudur asset because the US Army wanted to study the long-acting bupivacaine in battlefield wound injuries. What they want to do is be able to inject this asset at a wound site and have the soldiers participate in their evacuation, should they need to evacuate." "The great thing about liposomal bupivacaine in our Probudur formulation is it does not cause a motor block. What I mean by that is because local anesthetics stay numb, in this case, you're still able to function, you're still able to move your extremities. The idea here is that it would block it for 96 hours, enough time for a soldier to extract themselves without so much assistance or without the use of an opioid to block their pain." #VirpasPharma #PainManagement #NonAddictive #PainControl VirpaxPharma.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Jay Shah, Chief Medical Officer of Aktiia, discusses the importance of tracking blood pressure and the challenges of managing high blood pressure. With only one in five people with high blood pressure having it under control, long-term monitoring is crucial for better understanding blood pressure trends and optimizing health. The Aktiia wearable blood pressure monitoring device uses optical signal processing to continuously monitor blood pressure without the need for action to be taken by the patient. Jay explains, "The real danger of high blood pressure occurs over years, decades, long periods of time of having your blood pressure outside the optimal range. It is really what causes the detrimental effects to many of the different organs of our body, of our heart, brain, kidneys, eyes, aorta, and so on. And so the importance of understanding what your blood pressure is over long periods of time is really what we're focused on at Aktiia. That's why people should be aware of and track their blood pressure on a long-term basis." "Aktiia is a Swiss company and it was founded about five years ago. The technology has been in development for two decades by the founders, co-founders in an engineering think tank out of Switzerland. And they've been pioneers of what's called optical signal processing." "This is taking signals from LED lights and the reflection of that light from the skin or the capillary bed, the small vessels in our skin, and deducing the numeric physiologic parameters. And they started around heart rate. They were the pioneers of understanding how to take optical signals from sensors at the wrist and create heart rate calculations. This was done way back before there were smart watches or wearables. It was done back in the early 2000s. After they got good at that, they turned to blood pressure." #Aktiia #Hypertension #HighBloodPressure #BloodPressure #MedicalDevices #Wearable #HealthTracking #Fitness Aktiia.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Oliver Kharraz is the CEO and Founder of Zocdoc, a healthcare marketplace that helps patients find and book appointments with doctors. The platform was created to address the problem of long wait times for appointments and the lack of ability to take advantage of last-minute availability on providers' schedules. The goal is to streamline the patient experience, allow doctors to reduce administrative burdens, and improve patient engagement with easy-to-use tools for messaging, payments, and virtual visits. Oliver explains, "As we were operating the Zocdoc marketplace, we heard from our 80,000 doctors on the platform that they had trouble engaging patients. For the ones that use Zocdoc, it was easy because we're providing them a lot of the scaffolding and infrastructure. But doctors see a lot of patients who call them, who have been coming to them for a long time, or are coming to them for the first time and don't have the tools available. The tools out there are too expensive or super clunky and make it harder to engage patients, or both. And so, 80% of the doctors we talk to don't use any of these patient engagement tools, to the detriment of these practices and patients." "If you think about all this from a patient's perspective, they have all these different tools they need to log into. There's one tool where you can find out which doctors are in network, another tool where you find out when they're available, or maybe you have to call, another tool where you figure out what the benefits are that you have, where you have to enter your clinical information, where you have to pay. There are hundreds of logins in the journey, creating login fatigue on the patient side. As a result, they are less engaged and sometimes drop out of the funnel." #Zocdoc #PatientEngagement #DigitalHealth #HealthcareProviders #Telehealth #VirtualHealth zocdoc.com Download the transcript here

Mark Carbone, CEO of PN Medical, highlights the growing problem since COVID-19 of respiratory health and breathing issues. The Breather is a respiratory muscle training device that improves breathlessness, endurance, stamina, blood pressure, and sleep. Used daily, this device has shown benefits for patients, athletes, and the military in training respiratory muscles and counteracting bad posture and limitations of the environment on the lungs and diaphragm. PN Medical is developing a connected version of The Breather that uses AI and sensors to monitor respiratory health and provide personalized feedback. Mark explains, "The Breather is our flagship. That's the one we invented 43 years ago. And since then, we've moved from patient to athletics, Special Forces, and even professional singers and actors. So, at its core, it's a gym for your lungs and heart. That's the easiest way to explain it, but the whole system is a three-part system. So, it's a respiratory muscle training device at its core, and the second part is breathing protocols. We've learned these things over all these years with so many people. And then there's a mobile coaching app. If you want to go analog, you don't need the app. If you're not into that, we find so many people like to have something simple and do not want to go super high-tech. But if you want to, you can." "We've got an over-the-counter version. It was born in the clinical realm. So respiratory therapists started way back then, speech therapists, now PTs, OTs, and skilled nursing. So, it goes across all those disciplines. It does not have to be prescribed. It can be in the acute or subacute. It's growing exponentially in home health because everything's going to the home now. Usually, you will get it when you're checking out of the hospital, and then you follow the therapy once you're out. And it's something if you want to get the best out of it, you use it for the rest of your life." #TheBreather #BreathingDevice #BreatheBetter #RMT #RespiratoryTrainer pnmedical.com Download the transcript here

Mark Duman, the Director of MD Healthcare Consultants in the UK, focuses on patient engagement and digital health strategy, working with established life science companies to actually put patients at the center of their activities. They are also working with start-ups to scale up their digital health services, navigate healthcare systems, and develop patient engagement strategies. The key to a patient-centric approach is working from the bottom up to find patients through local community and faith-based groups and patient advocacy groups. Mark explains, "I'm a former pharmacist. I qualified in Aberdeen, in northern Scotland, back in 1990. I had a particular interest at that time in what we call over here pharmacy practice, the idea of supporting patients to take medicines, which, as we know, 50% of them sadly don't take as prescribed. That has been my focus throughout my career. I've worked in the National Health Service, which, as many of you will know, is the British healthcare system that is funded publicly. So I've dispensed medicines and talked to patients, and long story short, about 20 years ago, I got into the whole patient engagement side of things. No decision about us without the patient being included." "On the life sciences side, lots of talk about patient engagement and, in many cases, lots of action, but it's often not coordinated. And it happens possibly within silos across even small businesses or small to medium biopharma. In the large ones, it's often even more diluted or siloed. We're being asked to look at where is the patient engagement strategy that joins this together. Where is the operationalization of this so that each part of the function doesn't just say it but truly engages patients and caregivers in the co-creation and co-production of their products and services?" #DigitalHealth #PatientEngagement #Healthcare #PatientFocused Mark.Duman@mdhealthcare.co.uk Download the transcript here

Derek Streat, Founder and CEO of DexCare, has created an orchestration platform that helps manage healthcare's demand and supply sides. As a data-driven intelligence company, the focus is on allocating limited resources to drive maximum productive utilization for all stakeholders. While there are often conflicting goals, using large data sets, risk models can be developed to meet the needs of patients, providers, and payers and better manage access to and cost of healthcare. Derek explains, "For the benefit of providers, patients, and health systems, those resources must be allocated. Those precious resources, with limited time and quantity, need to be allocated in a way that makes them the most productive utilization of those resources. We all know that, again, the reason that we often have to wait a long time to get access to care. Whether it's sitting in a waiting room in an ED or waiting weeks or months to get access to a specialist, the reason that happens is often there's a misallocation or misalignment of how those resources are allocated to patients. We figured out a way to do that better so that the capacity of those resources can be extended in a way to service more patients." "The sad reality of one of the major rate limiters in healthcare access these days is that there aren't enough skilled people around to take care of all the people that need to be taken care of. And with an aging population and people living longer and all those things, the human resources we have only go so far. This is also in the face of declining numbers, declining enrollments in medical institutions, etc. And so, you've got to have technology to help extend the capacity of doctors, nurses, and so forth, who are taking care of folks." #DexCare #SocialDeterminantsofHealth #SDOH #AccesstoCare #VirtualCare dexcare.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Carol DerSarkissian, Medical Director at Ezra, is bringing AI-enhanced MRI technology to a broader market to help detect cancer earlier in vulnerable and asymptomatic populations. Using Ezra Flash and a high-speed MRI protocol, MRIs are performed quickly and enhanced to provide high-quality images at the limits of the current standard of care for review by expert radiologists. The Ezra Flash scan is a full body scan now priced at $1,350, with a goal of $500. Carol elaborates, "The goal is early detection, which is one of our best tools in fighting cancer. Early cancer detection has about an 80% survival rate, compared to less than 20% for late-stage cancer. These statistics are from the American Cancer Society. Yet 50% of cancers are still detected at a late stage. There is a need. At Ezra, we're the first company to leverage artificial intelligence globally, AI across all three key components of the cancer screening process: one, imaging, two, analysis, and three, reporting and making it available directly to consumers." "Right now, the Ezra scan is not covered by insurance. However, as we're moving towards making it a faster, shorter scan, that will help the insurance companies cover it. In terms of AI and mammograms, when computer-assisted detection came out, that was an AI with a smaller database. Initially, it wasn't covered by insurance, but then they saw the utility of it, and it was covered by insurance. It is a direction we're moving in as more and more data and more and more evidence is accumulated." #CancerDetection #ProactiveScreening #AIinHealthcare #CancerScreening #FullBodyScan #WholeBodyScan #MRI #MRIScreening ezra.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Nora Zetsche, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Veta Health, a health tech company, has designed a continuous support solution for patients that includes virtual care and virtual support of in-person care. Remote monitoring includes patient-reported data, text messages, tracking from wearables and other passive sensors. Integrating existing electronic health records allows providers to incorporate the virtual data to enable clinicians to make appropriate treatment decisions. Nora explains, "It's always tricky with these buzzwords in health tech because everyone ends up having a different interpretation of them. And so, for us, remote monitoring isn't just what came about in the pandemic, which is these reimbursement codes around remote patient monitoring. Still, it's a whole gamut of virtual care extension into patients' homes. And a part of that is how we seamlessly get information from the patient to the caring clinicians." "And that is, for us, that remote monitoring, that on the one hand, entails the data from wearables that may be collected passively. It can contain survey data from the patient directly, patient-reported outcome data, and the interactions that clinical teams and clinical staff have with the patient as the patient is at home. This can be done asynchronously through text messages, secure messaging, and synchronously through telehealth. So it's the rest of how we get better insights into how the patients are doing in their homes or outside of clinical settings and how we better use those insights to support these patients." "There's a huge fear of just a sea of data you have to wade through to get insight into the patients. And that's never been our intention. We don't just collect data for the sake of collecting data and then give it in raw format to the clinicians. Our software platform has analytics and workflow tools to parse through the data, figure out which data is relevant for a clinician and a given patient at a given time, and prioritize that data for the clinicians. It gives the clinicians additional context to that data." #VetaHealth #HealthTech #RemoteMonitoring #MachineLearning #DigitalCare #VirtualCare myvetahealth.com Download the transcript here

Dror Zur, Founder and CEO of MAGENTIQ EYE, discusses the opportunities for reducing the risk of colorectal cancer through AI-assisted colonoscopies. He points out the relatively high polyp miss rate that can be due to the size of the polyp, interpretations by physicians, and limitations of the procedure room. The MAGENTIQ-Colo AI system analyzes colonoscopy videos in real time and alerts the physician to polyps with a bounding box. Dror explains, "The procedure room is not a perfect place. There is some noise, and there are other people sometimes. There can be interference. Also, sometimes, the polyp passes through the video very fast, and even if it is not a very small polyp, it's hard to detect it. Sometimes, the point-of-view is such that it is hard to see. Sometimes, it is hidden behind a fold or something like that, and then only a very small part of it can be seen. It is hard to detect the polyp this way. There are several reasons for that." "The system takes the video, breaks it into frames, and analyzes each frame by the AI engine of the system, detects polyps if they are there, and shows the bounding box on the video where the physician is looking. It actually doesn't change anything in the clinical workflow. The procedure stays exactly the same. You just have additional information, which is decision support information for the physician that helps them to decide if there is a polyp. It is just plug-and-play. The installation is very simple." "This is, by the way, done by doing two colonoscopy tests, one immediately after the other with the same patient, and what is being detected in the second one is the miss rate of the first one, polyps that were not detected in the first one. It's called adenoma miss rate, the percentage of missed adenomas. The study showed a relative increase of 37% in the adenoma per colonoscopy, the average number of adenomas that are detected, and the miss rate is cut almost by half." #MAGENTIQEYE #AIHealthcare #ColorectalHealth #ColorectalCancer #HealthScreening #MedicalInnovation #HealthTechAdvancements #PatientAdvocacy #CancerPrevention #PatientExperience #FutureofHealthcare #MedicalResearch magentiq.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Eliseo Salinas, head of Research and Development at Delix Therapeutics, is focused on developing drugs to treat central nervous system disorders by addressing synaptic density. Applying knowledge about psychoplastogens and neuroplastogens, Delix strives to increase connections between neurons in treating depression more quickly and effectively than using antidepressants. Eliseo explains, "The term psychoplastogen was coined only a few years ago when it was realized that certain substances, like ketamine or psychedelics like psilocybin, produce those increases in synaptic density in hours, not weeks. So, those were termed psychoplastogens. More recently, it is believed that the psychedelics or psychotomimetic effects of those psychoplastogens might not be necessary for the therapeutic benefit." "Neuroplastogens are those compounds that produce an acute increase in synaptic density in hours without producing those psychotomimetics or hallucinatory effects that the typical psychedelics produce." "When you look at the psychoplastogens, the drugs that induce those rapid increases in synaptic density, they are not all the same. So, for example, you have one that is psilocybin, which is in the magic mushrooms. That substance produces hallucination, typical hallucinations, a trip where the person or patient has a vivid hallucinatory experience. But there are others, like ketamine, that don't produce that type of hallucination. They rarely produce hallucination. Ketamine is a dissociative agent where you feel strange or sedated and sleep for a few hours, but not typically hallucinations. And finally, the most striking difference is the effect of electroconvulsive therapy, ECT, or electroshock. In animals, electroshock does exactly the same thing as ketamine and psilocybin or LSD, producing an increase in synaptic density in hours, but it doesn't produce hallucinations or dissociations." #DelixTherapeutics #Neuroplastogen #Psychoplastogen #Neuroplasticity #MentalHealth #Biotech #HealtheMind DelixTherapeutics.com Download the transcript here