Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Joshua Schiffman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Peel Therapeutics and has taken the understanding of the natural resistance to cancer by elephants to develop PEEL-224 to attack tumors. Using a plant toxin and modifying existing approaches, Peel has created a drug that increases the amount of the drug that gets to the cancer cells with reduced side effects.   Joshua explains, "Peel is actually the Hebrew word for elephant. So that's why we call ourselves Peel Therapeutics. My Co-Founder, Dr. Avi Schroeder, is from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel. While we were working on the elephant drug, we realized, you know what, it's more than just elephants. Looking around nature, we understand that evolution has had hundreds of millions of years to perfect, in some cases, perfect cancer-fighting protein or peptide or anti-inflammatory molecule. Our lead drug, which we call PEEL-224, actually works really well targeting the DNA repair mechanism in cancer cells." "This DNA repair mechanism is called topoisomerase 1. And by blocking it, we're able to actually ensure that cancer cells essentially self-destruct. At Peel, we say that we like to engineer nature better than evolution intended. So, in the case of PEEL-224, we've taken this plant toxin, it's called camptothecin. It comes from an ancient Chinese tree called the Happy Tree, and we've modified it so that it can avoid chemoresistance. So, in other words, you give this drug to the patient, which goes to the tumor, and the tumor cell can't spit it out anymore. And we're seeing remarkable early results in mice and now have begun a clinical trial." @peel_tx #PeelTherapeutics #PeopleofPeel #Cancer #Inflammation #PEEL224 #Nature #Biotech #NaturesMoleculesIntoMedicine  peeltx.com  Download the transcript here

Cristina Varner is the life science Practice Leader at Newfront, a technology-focused insurance broker. While digital health and telemedicine companies have robust technology infrastructure, they tend to be less medically focused and unaware of insurance requirements to cover bodily injury, financial injury, data breaches, cyber liability, and state regulatory requirements. Wearables and data collected by them are adding issues of privacy, security, and data accuracy. Cristina elaborates, "I'm not going to say I'm surprised because a lot of the founders of these companies come from technology backgrounds, from tech companies. And so insurance just is not, and risk management is just not top of mind for many of them. And so we're not surprised. They're moving very quickly. I think when COVID came to be, digital health definitely exploded. And during the COVID period is when we started to recognize where some companies were lacking in risk management infrastructure. And I think that many of the companies we see now are much better positioned from a risk management perspective and also are more aware." "There are more customers and patients with wearables that are recognizing that their privacy and their security are important. I don't think historically, a lot of owners of wearables ever really considered those types of concerns. But now there's a lot more scrutiny in this area. And the other issue that comes up in tandem with privacy and security is data accuracy. If your data is not accurate on your wearable, for example, and it allows a patient to make a decision based on inaccurate data, which can result again in potential bodily injury to the patient." @NewfrontHQ #DigitalHealth #Telemedicine #Insurance #Wearables #RiskInsurance  Newfront.com Download the transcript here

Seli Fakorzi, Director of Mental Health Operations at TimelyCare, and Gaurang Choksi, CEO and Founder of Violet, join me to discuss their partnership to bring comprehensive healthcare to college students from all socioeconomic backgrounds, genders, ethnicities, and physical abilities. Training healthcare providers with the tools to understand different communities allows clinicians to learn new ways to be more inclusive and build trusted relationships with patients. Seli explains, "Providing quality, equitable access to care is a foundational mission for Timely. We are aware that students from underserved and underrepresented populations many times possess unique barriers to care, and that has made seeking help increasingly difficult. Breaking down those barriers in as many areas as possible has been our goal. Forming this relationship and partnership with Violet will help in those areas."  Gaurang elaborates, "I'll briefly share exactly how we get to understand how a clinician is doing, and then I'll share more about how we educate. At Violet, when a clinician joins us, we go through a process called benchmarking their cultural competence. We take a look at five pillars of information, including who is that specific person, what communities their family or they belong to, we look at what are the communities they feel really confident serving. That's a clinical measure called self-efficacy that we've pulled in." "Then we also look at what are the communities they want to work with, the communities they've studied about and the communities they have worked with, using claims data and their voices. Then using all this information, we get to have clarity on is that specific provider doing well working with the BIPOC or LGBQ or TGNC communities." #TimelyCare #JoinViolet #Healthcare #VirtualCare #LGBTQHealth #TGNCHealth #BIPOCHealth #MentalHealth #HealthDisparities #HealthEquity #MinorityMentalHealth timelycare.com       joinviolet.com Download the transcript here              

Michael Axt, the Chief Member Empowerment Officer at Zelis, is focused on helping healthcare payers and clinicians provide more information to patients about expected costs for procedures and visits to providers and hospitals. A recent survey conducted with Hanover Research revealed insights about patients' challenges in understanding healthcare billing and correcting errors. Driven by the move to transparency, Zelis acquired Sapphire to offer the Sapphire Digital solution to enable patients to better understand insurance benefits and the correct amount the patient owes.  Michael explains, "We found some interesting insights. Over 40 percent of the consumers in our study indicated that they were significantly frustrated in trying to find the right person to resolve an error. So they might have found an error, but they didn't know how to do anything about it. For those individuals, it took a month or more for nearly half of our respondents. For 70 percent of them they spent over two hours of their own time trying to work to correct this." "To the extent that there's greater clarity for the member or the patients in understanding the bill and what they owe, they're more likely to pay it more promptly. So we all know that cash flow is a challenge, and collections on patient liabilities are frankly atrociously low in the healthcare space." "For the health insurance companies and payers, there are options as well. Obliviously improving the member experience helps to improve retention and reduce churn in the plans. Also, if they're bringing tools that help to accelerate payment to the provider, it has opportunities for them to improve their relationships with their provider networks, which is a huge strategic asset for the health insurance companies." @ZelisHealthcare #Healthcare #PaymentIntegrity #HealthcareCosts #ConsumerBilling #PriceTransparency #HealthcareBilling #MedicalBillingErrors zelis.com Download the transcript here

Patricia Panzarino, otherwise known as Pidgie, was born with spinal muscular atrophy, SMA, a severe progressive neuromuscular disease. As a singer and songwriter and one of the oldest women living with SMA, Pidgie is celebrating the release of her new album, Just Breathe. Her experience of successfully taking Evrysdi from Genentech has given her more energy and enthusiasm. Pidgie elaborates, "They didn't know as much when I was born. I was six months old and did not achieve the milestone of crawling properly. My mom took me to the doctor. I had an older sister who had it as well. She was 12 years older than me, so they said, "Here we go again." They called it Amyotonia back then. But as far as a solid diagnosis of blood tests and DNA and stuff, truthfully, that was three years ago. But SMA used to be diagnosed clinically. So I knew I had it, but it was a different way to diagnose it." "Before the medication, you're talking 61 years of lifestyle—great parents kept me active. My father adapted things for me to participate more fully. For example, we had a boat that you could sleep on with a flying bridge, and he took a Hoyer lift that you use to transfer, put it on the flying bridge, and hoisted me up, so I could pilot this 31-foot boat. I was kept very active, taking vitamins and eating healthily. I never really did drugs or got really into alcohol. I just tried to keep a healthy balance and positivity until the medication. Now I'm still doing all of that because that really helps. You can't take it and just party and not eat well and stay up late and not sleep." #PidgieMusic #Pidgie #SpinalMuscularAtrophy #SMA #NeuromuscularDisease #Evrysdi PidgieMusic.com  Download the transcript here  

Dr. Myron Czuczman is the Chief Medical Officer and Executive Vice President of Citius Pharmaceuticals, which is developing an advanced treatment for cutaneous T cell lymphoma, CTCL, a rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The original version of their drug ONTAK has been reformulated, and I/ONTAK is now in clinical trials to confirm efficacy in controlling severe itching and improving the quality of life for patients. Myron explains, "This is a protein, a fusion protein, of interleukin-2, the whole molecule that has been fused with diphtheria toxin. With respect to any of the cells like the cells we're talking about, CTCL, it actually binds to the IL-2 receptor, internalizes, and in that manner, kills the tumor cells." "The agent ONTAK was taken off the market, and this new version, I/ONTAK or E7777, is a reformulation. It's more purified and it's about one and a half to two times more bioactive than the original ONTAK. From the clinical trials which led to our submission of the BLA recently, we've looked at the safety and efficacy, and it's consistent with the original formulation. There are no new safety issues, and it has good activity in patients, even heavily pretreated patients." "The issue here is, unfortunately, this disease, the relapsed/refractory CTCL, is incurable. The only time one has a chance to cure it is if you get it early, if you have young patients that have what we call an HLA compatible donor. In a very small number of patients, an allogeneic stem cell transplant could be curative. But the vast majority of these patients, who are elderly, are not candidates for allogeneic transplant. So, unfortunately, these are incurable individuals with bad diseases." @CitiusPharma #Cancer #Lymphoma #RareDisease #Immunotherapy $CTXR citiuspharma.com Download the transcript here

Brian Pepin is the CEO of Rune Labs, and Aura Oslapas is a woman with Parkinson's who helped create the underlying software for Rune's StrivePD platform. With a focus on precision neurology and a mission to collect relevant data, Rune has refined Aura's work to create an app that allows patients to manage their everyday life better. By combining digital data with logged information, the platform provides a customized plan for each patient to manage unique symptoms. Aura explains, "I've been working in the design world for 40 years. I was someone who, early on in my Parkinson's journey, was sensitive to the medication and developing side effects pretty early on and was having challenges describing what was going on to the neurologist. I got a lot of nodding but not necessarily understanding. So personally, I wanted to better track and learn from the interplay of the medications with my symptoms and the side effects I was experiencing." Brian elaborates, "So especially through the work that we've done with Apple and getting the FDA approval with them around turning the Apple Watch into a Parkinson's symptom monitor, we're able to get this wonderful time series picture of what's going on when a patient is at home in their own environment. This gives us a look at how that relates to different medications that they're taking, or different therapies that they're on, or some of these different environmental effects, mood, exercise, and diet that can really affect somebody's quality of life." @Rune_Labs #ParkinsonsDisease #PrecisionNeurology #PrecisionMedicine #StrivePD #DigitalHealth  runelabs.io Download the transcript here

Ryne Natzke, Chief Revenue Officer for Sphere, works with healthcare providers to facilitate patient payments using technology to smooth the process.  Medical debt is increasing, and reports are that nearly half of Americans can not afford an unexpected $500 medical expense without stress to their budgets. Transparency of costs and adding flexibility to patients for payments are key to reducing the impact of preventative and unexpected medical costs.  Ryan explains, "The thing about medical debt also is that it, by definition, is almost always unexpected. You don't plan to go to the emergency room or do anything like that, and this is beyond just having insurance. This is debt that a patient owes after insurance already takes care of their side. So, it's impacting a large number of Americans and has a really big impact on their day-to-day lives and day-to-day finances."  "The two things that come to mind for me are transparency and flexibility. As we talked about at the beginning, a lot of it is the unknown and for the most part, is also unexpected. Giving patients information about what they owe and why ahead of time, before the care has been delivered before the claim is adjudicated and the final bill becomes due, is important, before it's too late to change behaviors. So, if you can help somebody budget, or if you could help somebody prepare for what's going to be coming down the line, it allows them to make more informed decisions." @SphereCommerce #MedicalDebt #HealthcarePriceTransparency #MedicalInsurance #Patients SphereCommerce.com Download the transcript here 

Kat Kwiatkowski, the Senior VP of Clinical Development at Strata Oncology, has tested over 60,000 patients and used their clinical outcome data to build advanced multivariate biomarkers to better predict patient response to approved cancer treatments. Using molecular profiling data, Strata has created an immunotherapy response score leveraging DNA components and the immune gene expression components to better capture the variability and response to PD-L1 therapies. Kat explains, "People with the same cancer, meaning if they have breast or lung cancer, can have different forms of the disease. So responses to treatment can and do vary. Prior to 2012, the most popular treatment option for patients with advanced cancer was chemotherapy, which is extremely toxic. And due to rapid advancements in molecular and biotechnology, we're now able to do a few things better." "One, we're better at identifying cancers earlier, when our chances for cures are the highest. Second, we're better at characterizing the tumors, to understand what makes them vulnerable. Three, with that information, we can then build drugs to target those specific vulnerabilities. And finally, we can now also better comprehend the interaction between drug and patient, to understand which types of patients at the molecular level will respond to or have increased side effects. This personalization really provides us with an extraordinary opportunity to improve patient outcomes."  #StrataOncology #ImmunoOncology #PrecisionOncology #MolecularProfiling #RealWorldData strataoncology.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Leonard Ganz is the Chief Medical Officer and Divisional Vice President of Medical Affairs for Abbott's Cardiac Rhythm Management Division. Traditional pacemakers include a pulse generator that is connected to the inside of the heart with insulated wires. These leads relay the electrical activity that goes between the pacemaker and the heart muscle. The Abbott Aveir VR is a single-chambered leadless pacemaker with improved battery longevity that is implanted inside the heart and eliminates the risks from leads.   Len explains, "There are different types of slow heart rhythms that people develop. Most commonly, people develop slow heart rhythms as they get older, but there are situations in which younger people develop slow heart rhythms as well. And at the most fundamental level, a pacemaker has to sense the intrinsic heartbeat, or heart rhythm, and then stimulate or pace the heart if the intrinsic heart rhythm isn't adequate or isn't as fast as the physician would like it to be."  "Over the five or six decades that we've had implantable pacemakers, there've been many, many advancements. Pacemakers are fully programmable in terms of heart rates and other features. We've gone from pacemakers that sense and pace in a single heart chamber to pacemakers that sense in two heart chambers and then even three heart chambers. So there have been tremendous advances over these years. One of the most important advances in recent years has been the development of what we call a leadless pacemaker." #AbbottCardio #Pacemaker #ImplantablePacemakers #LeadlessPacemakers #HeartMuscle abbott.com Download the transcript here