Empowered Patient Podcast

Martin Brenner, CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of iBio, is focused on the untapped potential of therapeutic antibodies for obesity and cardiometabolic diseases. Leveraging AI and machine learning, iBio is streamlining the antibody discovery and optimization process and addressing the need for more complex antibody mechanisms of action. Their lead candidate, iBio 600, is an anti-myostatin antibody designed to address the side effects of muscle mass and bone density loss associated with current GLP-1 therapies. Martin explains, "We can separate this into multiple areas. First of all, there's a predictive model that suggests that there are 5,000 different targets related to disease out there. So, there are 5,000 different possibilities to make medicines. All of the currently approved antibodies target only 92 targets. Even worse, 40% of approved antibodies only target about 10. So you can imagine there's a huge untapped potential of novel targets for which antibodies could be used. The problem is that the technologies must keep up with this to open that novel target space. That is problem number one." "So, as you know, AI has gotten a little bit of a bad reputation over the last few years, and there was a huge hype about this, and I want to be very clear about this. It takes more than 10,000 steps to make a medicine. At iBio, we enable three of these steps with generative AI. So, that does not make us an AI company. That does not make our molecules AI drugs. What it does is it actually makes it possible for us to create medicines that we couldn't do before. So, the way we use AI at iBio is multiplefold. First, we start our discovery process with the epitope steering engine. You have to imagine that drug targets are massive proteins, and only very small regions on these proteins have a biological function. So you want to get your antibody exactly to those regions that cause a biological function."  #iBio #DrugDiscovery #MedAI #Obesity #GLP1 #CardioMetabolicDiseases #Antibodies #AntibodyTherapies #Myostatin iBioinc.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Lauren Parks Nicola, Chief Medical Officer at RevealDx, has extensive experience dealing with the challenges of accurately describing lung nodules and distinguishing between benign and malignant nodules based on visual inspection of CT scans. RevealDx software tool integrates into the radiologists' workflow and uses advanced algorithms and a large database of lung nodule data to provide a malignancy score for lung nodules. This technology can help reduce unnecessary follow-up scans and invasive procedures for patients with benign lung nodules while identifying high-risk ones requiring more aggressive investigation. Lauren explains, "Reveal's product is a software that characterizes lung nodules. So lung nodules, little blips on a lung that we find on a chest CT. And the thing is, they're very, very common. Lots of patients have them, they can turn out to be cancer, most of them aren't. But with the knowledge that we have right now, just as radiologists looking at those nodules, it's really hard to tell which ones are going to turn out to be cancerous and which ones aren't."  "The software tool characterizes which nodules are more likely to be malignant and might need faster diagnosis, more aggressive workup, biopsy, some interventions, things that can help us diagnose cancer earlier when it's easier, less expensive, and much better for the patient to treat versus the ones that don't need that kind of care. And for a lot of patients, that means not needing follow-up scans, not needing biopsies, and not needing invasive treatments to prevent something that would never have been a problem for them in the first place. So it is that added information, as well as added clinical information, gives us and the patients tools to better predict how these are going to behave." #RevealDx #RadiologyAI #MedicalImaging #Radiology #LungCancer #DigitalHealth #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #AIinHealthcare #MedicalAI  reveal-dx.com Download the transcript here

Daniel Getts, the CEO and Founder of Myeloid Therapeutics is focused on the role of myeloid cells in the immune response to solid tumors. These cells are the first responders in the immune system and play a crucial role in bridging the innate and adaptive immune response. The Myeloid Therapeutics' mRNA technology activates myeloid cells in tumors, making the tumor microenvironment hot and attracting other immune cells to fight the cancer. Daniel explains, "The ability to harness our immune systems has revolutionized how we treat cancer. Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go, and if you think about some of the worst of the worst cancers, such as pancreatic cancer, liver cancer, and so on, immunotherapy has still not gotten us to a place where we can solve this. It's our mission at Myeloid Therapeutics to overcome these challenges. We've uncovered a lot of really interesting things about these cancers in the last 20 years, and we've been harnessing that knowledge."  "Myeloid cells are at the heart of the immune system. They're the first responders. So, if you have an infection or bump your knee, these cells are immediately called to the site to wall off and prevent any more damage. However, they also serve as the bridge to adaptive immunity, the T cells and the B cells, which are also important for integrating an immune response. In the context of COVID vaccines, we talk about antibodies and T cells, it's the myeloid cells that are essential. In the context of what we've been learning, immunotherapy, up until recently, had been very focused on T cells and how to short-circuit the whole system just by using or activating those cells to kill cancer. And what we're starting to learn is to harness the full capability of our own immune systems, you've got to go back to the start. You've got to harness the myeloid compartment so you can orchestrate all immune elements to kill cancer." #MyeloidTherapeutics #MyeloidCells #ImmuneSystem #SolidTumors #Cancer #ImmuneResponse #Oncology #TumorMicroenvironment myeloidtx.com Download the transcript here

Saul Marquez, Founder and CEO of Outcomes Rocket, emphasizes the need for strategic healthcare communications, including earned media and paid advertising, content creation, and social influencers. The explosion of social media and online news outlets has changed the healthcare information environment, challenging companies to express authentic and intentional messages to their target audience. Identifying pain points and unique propositions is key to effective healthcare messaging that persuades, motivates, and informs. Saul elaborates, "I started the Outcomes Rocket agency as a podcast, and then it evolved into a full-service agency focused on healthcare organizations, leaders, and brands looking to maximize their impact in the market and accelerate their growth. We work in four areas: strategy, earned, owned, and paid. So, under each of those categories, there are different focus areas."  "It's never been more important for leaders to be authentic in an age of artificial intelligence and just so much noise. Authenticity cuts through that noise. And when I say authenticity, it's important for brands as well as leaders to be true to who they are, and it's important that the message be well-crafted and intentional. So, if you're being authentic on the fly or on the whim, that's not very strategic. You want to make sure that under the strategy and the work you do to put your messaging out there, that everything ties back to why you do what you do. How is it different? Whether you're an individual influencer or a brand, what is the promise?"  #OutcomesRocket #HealthcareInnovation #DigitalMarketing #HealthTech #HealthcareCommunications OutcomesRocket.health Download the transcript here

Robert Maxwell, Founder of ClinConnect, is building this neutral third-party intermediary between patients and clinical trial sponsors, improving on the clinicaltrials.gov platform by streamlining the clinical trial enrollment process. This patient-facing platform provides patients with up-to-date information about trial options and eligibility criteria and guides them through the enrollment process. This resource is particularly significant for the rare disease community, where ClinConnect works with patient advocacy networks to improve study design and identify trial participants.   Robert explains, "One thing that has changed over the last year since we last spoke is we have far more relationships and far better relationships with many clinical trial sponsors. So the folks behind whatever therapeutic or investigational, drug, biologic, whatever it might be. And so when it comes to recruitment and enrollment, we have what are called enrollment criteria, inclusion and exclusion criteria. Those are filed within the protocol with the FDA. Every clinical trial has some set of enrollment criteria." "Anyone can go to the FDA and get an understanding of what any trial enrollment criteria might be. It's listed on clinicaltrials.gov. But oftentimes what we have found is that the protocol that is on file with the FDA actually might be out of date, it might be invalid. There might be an update. There might be 10 updates that haven't been submitted to the FDA. And so what's helpful when patients work with a platform like ours, or I think we're the only one still somehow the only one doing this, is that we have those direct relationships with the sponsors." #ClinConnect #ClinicalTrials #ClinicalTrialRecruitment #ClinicalTrialEnrollment #ClinicalTrialRetention #RareDiseases clinconnect.io Download the transcript here

Angela Adams, CEO at Inflo Health, is addressing the opportunity to improve the tracking and follow-up of radiology findings. Info Health uses natural language processing to understand radiologists' reports and identify findings that require additional imaging and possible actions. Healthcare providers often lack the resources to manage radiology test results effectively.  Inflo Health's solution can drive significant revenue to these providers by minimizing missed follow-ups and appointments. Angela explains, "Inflo Health is a technology company that serves healthcare—primarily health systems and imaging centers. We're built around solving the problem for health systems of never missing a follow-up related to radiology. If you look at the research, it will show you pretty readily that about 50% of radiology findings and actionable findings are missed in the healthcare system today, primarily because it's a really difficult problem to solve. You've got a radiologist who dictates a report in real-time, understanding what the imaging is showing on a patient. Many times, they dictate multiple follow-ups in a study. They might find something that's incidental, meaning they're going for an image of their cervical spine because they have an upcoming surgery, but they might find a thyroid lesion on that scan. So, for the patient, not only how do we identify that there's a follow-up in that report, but also how do we care navigate the patient in the right direction?"   "The really big issues in the health system today are care navigation and the identification of follow-ups, which Inflo helps solve. We built a large language model. You probably hear that term a lot these days with ChatGPT and OpenAI and things like that. If you can think of one that's very specific to radiology language. What we've done is teach a computer to speak radiology language so that it can understand what the intention was of the radiologist. So we very much empower the radiologist, and whatever their follow-up is that they're identifying, we basically put a microphone to that, and we automate the tracking, the follow-up, the patient communication. So, we engage with the patient to ensure they understand their care. And in doing so, we're able to save - our last estimate was close to 20,000 patient lives a year." #InfloHealth #Radiology #PatientCare #HealthTech #HealthcareInnovation #MedAI inflohealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Chris Duma, President and Founder of Regeneration Biomedical, is developing stem cell therapies to treat neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, ALS, and multiple sclerosis. Their approach involves directly injecting the patient's stem cells into the brain ventricles to stimulate the brain's innate stem cells to repair and replace damaged neurons. Current clinical trials are showing promising results and, notably, minimal side effects compared to other Alzheimer's drugs. Chris explains, "So our focus is to treat the full disease and make a difference in the disease's progression. The way the disease presents itself and the way that the disease is actually cured. The focus until now has been to target particular areas of abnormality in patients’ brains. Those with Alzheimer's disease, as we know, have plaques in the brain, and they have tangles in the brain. Alzheimer's disease was discovered or invented by a pathologist in the early 1900s. When they sliced the brain of an Alzheimer's patient, they found these abnormal collections of protein, and they called them plaques and tangles. The target of most research and most treatments have been monoclonal antibodies to these plaques and tangles. And we at Regeneration Biomedical do not necessarily feel that that is the cause of the problem. We think that they're the end product of cell death. So, what you need to do is fix the problem from the origin, and there might be nothing other than a stem cell that could do that. So that is our trajectory, and that's where we are today." "We had rogue stem cell clinics out there that were giving stem cells for every possible disease, and patients were lured to places like Mexico, Germany, and China to get very expensive stem cell treatments that were probably completely worthless. The difference between them and us is that we're an FDA-cleared trial. We have gone to the FDA to do this and believe me, you are right, the FDA opening up their arms to stem cells is absolutely brand new. We're actually one of the newest kids on the block who can do this. What we're doing with our stem cells, which is directly injecting them into the brain, which we can discuss later, is the first in the world. We're at that threshold now that the FDA is probably looking more and more into this and more and more into personalized medicine. And that's what this falls into the category of as well." #RegenerationBiomedical #AlzheimersDisease #AlzheimersResearch #RegenerativeMedicine #StemCellTherapy #NeurodegenerativeDiseases #MedicalInnovation regenerationbiomedical.com Download the transcript here

Will Ho, President, CEO, and Co-Founder of IN8bio, a company developing next-generation cellular therapies using gamma delta T cells, which play a unique role in bridging the innate and adaptive immune systems. GDT cell therapies may have reduced side effects compared to other T cell therapies as they can more selectively target tumor cells while sparing healthy tissue. IN8bio is conducting clinical trials using autologous and allogeneic gamma delta T cells for leukemia and glioblastoma with the goal of eliminating the cancer.   Will explains, "As you probably are aware, our immune system is generally broken down into two halves. One is the innate or the immediate portion of the system, which is why we're called IN8bio, the gamma delta T cells, which are considered innate immune cells. On the other, the adaptive is the memory part of our immune system. The gamma delta T cells bridge between both the innate and the adaptive. They actually have features across both. In particular, one of their natural functions is actually to discriminate and to distinguish between those cells that are healthy and safe versus those that are transformed or should be eliminated. That's the very challenge of cancer cells. At the end of the day, they're our own cells, and the gamma delta T cells have a unique ability to distinguish between what should be safe and left alone versus those cells that they should kill." "With the CAR T therapies, we have genetically engineered specific targets such as CD 19 or DPMA into an alpha-beta T cell - somewhat of a release and let it go. Those cells go and seek out every cell in the body that expresses its specific target and kills it. I kind of half-heartedly joke that it's a little bit like Terminator- once you let it go, it seeks its target to try to kill it, no matter the secondary damage. In many cases, we've had numerous toxicities, some of which have resulted in patient death. The gamma delta T cells are more nuanced in its approach. We have created CAR T, specifically for the biology of gamma delta T cells." "Early preclinical work shows they can discriminate between the leukemic cells that should be eliminated and the healthy tissue. This will become increasingly important as we try to target solid tumors. Solid tumors is a market that's nine times bigger than that of leukemias and lymphomas. It's challenging because the tumors, at the end of the day, are intertwined in an organ. Most likely, we need to keep those organs, whether they're your brain like in glioblastoma that we're targeting, or lung cancer or pancreatic cancer and others, we need to be able to discriminate and pick out the healthy tissue versus the tumor tissue because we can't just completely ablate the organ."  #IN8bio #CancerZero #Immunotherapy #Immunology #CancerResearch #TCellEngagers #GDTCells #CART #CellTherapy #GeneTherapy #Pharmaceuticals #BioTech #ClinicalResearch IN8bio.com Download the transcript here  

Patrick Mobley, CEO and Co-Founder of Vivid Health has developed a platform to address the inefficiencies in the post-acute care industry. Home health and hospice nurses often spend hours completing required paper-based forms and assessments to create personalized patient care plans and submissions for payments. This technology aims to streamline the workflow and collection of patient information while proactively monitoring patients and using AI-powered voice agents to improve patient engagement. Patrick explains, "So the way it works with your standard home health organization is that referral is received from a hospital, and most of the work from that point on takes place within any EMR. There are some other vendors that process places, but there is no getting around that form. It is required that you've got to complete every single step. There's really no difference no matter what state you're in or what jurisdiction; you might see slight variations between Medicare, Medicare Advantage, or Medicaid, but it's rather consistent across every single home agency." "Well, it's a mixture of the nurse and medical director. The nurses are often called startup care nurses. They go in the home and complete the work. It can take anywhere from two to three hours to be in the patient's home, and then once it's done, the response care goes to the medical director for sign-off. From there, there are a couple of extra steps to validate some of the information and coding associated with it. Then, it can be submitted to CMS for payment." "For that problem, we wanted to take those anywhere from one to four hours and get them down. Well, not because we're trying not to be thorough or rush onto the next patient or anything like that. It's just that there were better ways to do it, and the technology advances, especially in the AI space, have gotten to the point where you can be efficient, lower that timeframe, and still provide good quality care." #VividHealth #AIinHealthcare #HomeHealthAI #HomeHealth #HomeCare #Hospice #EmergingAI vividhealth.ai Download the transcript here  

Dr. Jonathan Usuka, CEO of Sapient, uses insights about proteomics and metabolomics to provide deep molecular characterization of diseases from a single sample to support drug discovery, development, and approval. The company's unique dataset combines real-world data with longitudinal molecular profiling of tens of thousands of samples across different diseases, ethnicities, genders, and ages.  By measuring proteins and metabolites, this data and insights engine helps pharmaceutical companies gain a significantly more comprehensive view of the molecular basis of disease, better understand drug targets, and predict potential drug outcomes and safety. Jonathan explains, "We support drug discovery and drug development, and a couple of things are going on in the industry right now in discovery and development. One is the overall pharma landscape of how a drug gets approved. That's been fairly static since the 1970s with the creation of the FDA. So clinical trials are well established, but the structure of it was based around not knowing much about the underlying drug target that your drug is interacting with. Since then, they've tightened up the requirements around mechanisms of action, but mostly, the process itself is almost protein agnostic in terms of the development process and how the drug interacts with patients." "So what we do, what has happened recently, is a revolution in understanding the molecular basis of disease and how the therapeutics interact with it at a molecular level. We support pharmaceutical companies in understanding the safety and the efficacy and being able to predict how their therapies will do in the clinic, and then really understanding a lot more about the available drug targets, which expands the arsenal of ways to fight disease."    "At Sapient, we don't just identify dynamic biomarkers, biomarkers that change with disease or change in response to therapy. We also give a lot of context about those biomarkers. We also say where we have seen those biomarkers occur and how they have changed in response to other therapies, disease conditions, and immunological responses. So, a pharma company can see better what it's getting into when it invests in a dynamic biomarker."  #SapientBio #Multiomics #Proteomics #Metabotomics #DarkProteome #BeyondtheGenome #Plasmaproteomics #Biomarkers  sapient.bio Download the transcript here