Empowered Patient Podcast

Priyanka Dutta-Passecker is the CEO and Founder of Healiva, a Swiss start-up focused on innovative treatments for acute and chronic wounds. Healiva begins the process by cleaning the wound using an enzyme invented by Priyanka. Depending on the severity of the wound, autologous or allogeneic cell therapy is used to make new skin to heal the wound. Priyanka explains, "So, to give a background for when we talk about personalized cell therapies and autologous cell therapy. We take a patient here, and from the patient, we make the patient's skin. That means that we're completely personalizing and making the skin of the patient. And this is given to extremely chronic non-healing wound patients like venous leg ulcer patients or diabetic foot ulcer patients. The skin gets integrated on their ulcer and closes the ulcer. That's one of our autologous cell therapy products called Epidex." "We do keep the primary cells when we take the hair follicle. As you may know, hair follicles are epithelial cells that we expand, and we keep the cells. And when they come back, we can make the full skin, the epidermis differentiation, within two weeks. But generally, it takes four weeks. And it's given to the patient once it's ready within four to five days." "So, just to elaborate on what we mean by allogeneic cell therapy. So quite different from the autologous one, in allogenic cell therapy, we are taking healthy skin cells from you and me. We expand the skin cells, and we give the skin cells to the patient. What happens is that it releases growth factors which help in the healing. And there is no rejection because, of course, the cells do not stay on the wounds of the patient." #Healiva #WoundCare #PatientCare #SwissStartups #CellTherapy #ChronicWounds #RegenerativeMedicine #Diabetes #Healthtech healiva.com Download the transcript here

Steve Kent is Chief Product Officer at Know Labs, which has developed a new sensor that uses noninvasive radiofrequency spectroscopy to measure molecules in the body. Their first target is to non-invasively measure glucose to help those with diabetes manage their conditions more effectively. As a sensor and diagnostics company, Know Labs is working to understand how its sensor and technology can be integrated with best-in-class insulin delivery systems to provide a portable, reliable, and affordable solution for a growing global audience. Steve explains, "It's a big breakthrough as far as what you're able to measure by being able to penetrate deeper into the human body. Also, we can send up to 400,000 different frequencies through one sensor, whereas, with LEDs, as the example I gave earlier, you can only send something like three to five per LED. Then, you have to physically change out the entire sensor. With ours, that programmatic control allows us an unprecedented amount of new data through the sensor field." "The sensor has a very sophisticated control unit in it. It's programmable. Today, we can connect it to laptops. It can be connected through a cable. It can be connected through WiFi or Bluetooth to any other companion device. Right now, it's very powerful in that we can have full programmable control over how the device works in the world and understand the scenarios that allow it to perform the best. The short answer is yes, it can connect to an iPhone or an Android, and then I think there are still questions we're looking to solve on the best possible patient experience. I could envision the data being shown on your phone. The device itself may also be able to provide you with a reading directly. There are still some questions to answer there as far as what is the best experience for our future customers." @TheKnowLabs #KnowLabs #Diabetes #GlucoseMonitoring #MedicalDevices #DiabetesManagement #NoninvasiveGlucoseMonitoring KnowLabs.co Download the transcript here

Dr. Tony Willoughby is the CEO of Stellus Rx, which has created a model of collaboration for the physician, patient, and pharmacist to provide a more robust system to encourage medication adherence and lifestyle changes. While clinicians may prescribe a treatment plan, pharmacists are in a position to work with patients to address their specific concerns and monitor the patient for drug interactions and possible de-prescribing strategies. Tony explains, "What our model does is it comes alongside the physician. In that moment of the last 90 seconds of the appointment. We actually have that physician connect that patient to a pharmacist that's embedded virtually in that clinic to expand the capacity of the physician. To pick up that conversation and give space to understand what the patient's belief systems are, what their questions are, how to coordinate or optimize the medication to fit the patient's belief system and the product design of their health plan or their pharmacy benefit plan." "Anytime you increase volume, you increase complexity. Whether that's the volume of different medication types or volume of dosing, you have more complexity in that moment. And so, our targeted population is your multi-chronic condition patients. We work primarily with primary care physicians, so think about the disease states that stay aligned with their primary care physicians the longest and what disease states are dominant within the US healthcare system. So we take care of a lot of diabetic patients, multi-chronic diabetic patients, COPD, hypertension, mental health, all the things that walk in and out of a primary care practice that has a type of complexity that goes along with that patient's regimen." #StellusRx #Pharmacy #Pharmacist #PatientCare #MedicationAdherence #ValueBasedCare #IntegratedPharmacyCare stellusrx.com Download the transcript here

Dave Hering, Chief Executive Officer and Director at Invivyd, draws on his experience with vaccines working at Pfizer and research on monoclonal antibodies to engineer targeted monoclonal antibodies to treat diseases like cancer and prevent diseases like COVID-19. Providing antibodies, particularly to immunocompromised people, overcomes the limitations of vaccines and reduces the risk of severe outcomes from diseases. Dave elaborates, "Antibodies are made by humans. They're made in response to an antigen, a virus being introduced into the body. Frequently, the starting point for these antibodies is to take blood and serum from people infected from a disease and look for these antibodies. And so that's the starting way. We call that mining antibodies. You can get them from survivors of different diseases and then use them to generate and create antibodies that look like that." "And so Invivyd does the same thing. We start with those. But with our technology and a partnership with a company called Adimab, we've perfected this engineering that does this affinity maturation. You can do this in yeast cells. And do it and replicate it thousands and thousands of times with minor tweaks, and see how it will perform against those viruses. And so, by running those types of experiments, you're doing more precision—making modifications and finding antibodies that now aren't just the ones that your body produces but have been optimized to neutralize the virus." #Invivyd #COVID #COVID19 #mAbs #VVD222 #Antibodies #MonoclonalAntibodies invivyd.com Download the transcript

Luká Yancopoulos is CEO of Grapevine Technologies, a COVID-inspired company determined to increase resilience in the supply chain for healthcare supplies. Disrupting the current network of manufacturers, importers, and distributors, Grapevine is connecting suppliers directly to end users. They aim to build a more resilient network of suppliers, eliminate waste and unnecessary costs for medical providers, and reduce patient charges. Luká explains, "Not a lot has changed in the healthcare space regarding logistics and supply chain in my lifetime. So, getting things to change and getting things to budge is definitely difficult in nature. But our primary business innovation is that we seamlessly connect a data-driven network of primary suppliers directly to healthcare practices." "When I say that Grapevine is connecting this data-driven network of primary suppliers, we're using the data made publicly available by the United States government to find actual importers or manufacturers of the medical supplies and find the companies that sell to McKesson, Henry Schein, Cardinal Health, and Medline. And we basically onboard those primary suppliers, those importers, upstream of the middleman, McKesson, and these big dinosaur distributors. And we connect those importers directly to end users." "There's a lot that incurs additional costs between the importer and the end user when they purchase from McKesson. They have to move it to McKesson's warehouse. They then pay the McKesson labor staff. They pay the account manager. And by bypassing the middleman, you bypass with him his inefficiencies, his markups. And at Grapevine, we can offer the same products that these healthcare practices already buy at an average of 62% lower prices, which is a significant saving that can be carried forward to patients and reduce the financial burden of healthcare costs." #GrapevineTechnologies #SupplyChain #MedicalSupplies #MedicalDevices #Healthcare #CostReduction #SupplyShortages go-grapevine.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Anupam Jena is an economist, a physician, a podcaster, and the Joseph P. Newhouse Professor of Healthcare Policy at the Harvard Medical School. He's also the co-author, along with Dr. Christopher Worsham, of the newly published book Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces that Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health. Anupam, also known as Dr. Bapu, combines his medical training with curiosity about cause and effect to explore explanations for failures and successes in providing healthcare and how chance occurrences affect our health. Of particular interest is the power of natural experiments to enhance understanding of the effect of a treatment or drug within a larger universe than traditional randomized clinical trials. Bapu elaborates, "One of the benefits of these natural experiments is that they are more generalizable. They tell us what might happen in a real world because you're exactly right. If a clinical trial is performed, it may be performed in a very particular geographic area, in a very particular type of patient that is not the same as the type of person who might take that medication in the real world." "I don't think that we should be making whole-scale treatment decisions without randomized trials. So those are the gold standard, and we need them to be there. They provide an important foundation." "But it's also important to know that they do have some limitations because we might not be able to do a randomized trial on every population person that we care about. That's where the natural experiments come in. I think they really are complements and not substitutes because once we have a sense that this medication does work based on randomized trials, then we can do natural experiments to say, "Well, they might work better or not as well in these particular populations of people." "So it's no surprise to people that randomness or chance does affect our health in ways that we can appreciate. For example, a child drowns in the swimming pool because, just by chance, someone gets distracted in the moment, or someone is hit by a car. Again, totally random events. In many cases, a cancer, when there are no risk factors, that's unpredictable and it's a chance event." #RandomActsofMedicine @DrBapuPod @AnupamBJena @DoubledayBook Random Acts of Medicine Download the transcript here

Will Cantrell is the Director of Product Solutions at InteliChart, a SaaS-based service providing digital tools to providers and EHR partners. Their focus is on the workflows of staff and clinicians and the patient experience in a telehealth environment or in-person appointment. InteliChart integrates existing systems with innovative technology to facilitate scheduling, reduce clinician stress, encourage preventative care, and better manage chronic diseases. Will explains, "We focus more on workflows for staff to move in between patient visits, initiate sessions, put patients back in waiting rooms, move them between providers, and the patient experience is our primary focus. We can spend a lot of time building that in, not just to a telehealth workflow but into the entirety of the patient journey, and trying to bring that back to the patient portal, which is the hub of engagement for us. So, the patient gets more of a seamless experience through all their touch points." "You don't have to worry about travel time and shifting between rooms, so you have some savings there as well. The nice thing about telehealth, too, is if the patient queues up early into the waiting room, and you're early, you can grab that patient and start to have that visit with them early, at least from our dashboard. Once you go through that, you can move on to the next patient, who is early. So you have some room there to make gains and have advantages from a time savings over in-office visits." #InteliChart #PatientEngagement #Telehealth #Telemedicine #HealthIT #HealthOutcomes InteliChart.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Björn Mellgård, VP and Global Program Lead of rare genetics and hematology at Takeda, is passionate about finding a cure for cTTP, congenital thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura. This ultra-rare disease, caused by an enzyme deficiency, presents in early childhood and results in life-threatening blood clots. With their investigational drug TAK-755, a recombinant enzyme, the volume is very small, and the infusion takes four to five minutes and is a replacement therapy to allow patients to avoid daily symptoms and acute episodes. Björn explains, "What happens then is that we have our coagulation system, and many people have heard about bleeding disorders, mainly probably hemophilia, where you lack certain factors which are important to make the blood clot. TTP is on the other side of the spectrum, and the deficiency we're talking about, this ADAMTS13 enzyme, is also importantly involved in blood coagulation." "But the effect is when you don't have this enzyme present. The blood has a tendency to spontaneously form blood clots in the circulation. And these blood clots then tend to lodge in critical organs such as the brain, the heart, and the kidney, and the patients then suffer symptoms based on that." "So, our drug then represents a recombinant enzyme. So, it's a recombinant protein that is produced in a laboratory. It's exactly the same as we have in our bodies. And this kind of replacement therapy has been used for a long time. And I mentioned hemophilia as an example where Takeda and also other companies have recombinant factor VIII in that case. So, the principle behind this treatment is to give the patient what they're missing. That's pretty straightforward in some sense." #Takeda #cTTP #TAK755 #RecombinantEnzyme #RareDisease Takeda.com Download the transcript here

Steve Taddei, Co-Founder and Lab Director of HearAdvisor created to provide unbiased, scientifically-based analysis of over-the-counter hearing aids. With recent legislation allowing hearing aids to be sold directly to consumers and online, there is a need for a clear understanding of the features and benefits of available audio-enhancing technology. Using a life-like mannequin equipped with microphones, HearAdvisor can perform repeatable experiments to test the hearing aids across several categories and rank them for different purposes. Steve explains, "Selecting devices that we found to perform best was quite a process, and I would like to say that HearAdvisor is an independent lab. We are not owned by any hearing aid company. We're kind of three hearing technology nerds or just audiology nerds, people who love sound, acoustics, and hearing. We saw this problem, we came together, and we used as best as possible, the scientific approach to make recordings of all these devices. These recordings emulate, as best as possible, what an individual may experience in the real world." "So, multi-talker situations where you have one, two, or three people speaking, with various types and levels of background noise. We make recordings with all the technologies, and we measure their performance through several different metrics. We don't need to get into all of them, but for example, algorithms that predict how well an individual with hearing loss might be able to hear speech in background noise." "Then we have an industry-standard mannequin, and the mannequin's name is KEMAR. It's an acronym for the product, but this mannequin emulates the average size shape of a human head and body, and it has little microphones where the eardrums are. So it's very similar and when we make recordings from our eight-speaker array, as it's called through our mannequin KEMAR, it emulates you sitting in that environment." #HearAdvisor #HearingHealth #PatientAccessibility #HearingAids #OTCHearingAids #OvertheCounterHearingAids Hearadvisor.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Zereana Jess-Huff, Senior VP of North American Operations at United We Care, a digital behavioral health company, created Stella. This advanced generative AI solution recognizes 40 human emotions and speaks 29 languages. Accessed through mobile apps and WhatsApp, this resource is interactive and available 24/7 to address daily stress issues and clinical diagnoses. A clinician-led self-paced, asynchronous video-based clinical program is available, as is coaching and resource material. Zereana elaborates, "Stella is designed to meet and treat you where you're at on a behavioral health spectrum because, as individuals, we move up and down the spectrum at any given point in our lives. Stella is targeted to be able to treat the wide spectrum, and the solution as a whole is a full stack solution, which again allows us to treat the user from subclinical up to hospitalization in terms of treatment." "So we are working on avatars right now. The intention is to create human-like faces that come in a number of nationalities and different ethnicities. So essentially, you can create your own avatar for Stella based on what you're most comfortable with and what you would like your therapist to look like. Stella, again, is not a therapist, but Stella is somebody talking to you, and so we felt it was important to give Stella a face. We just wanted users to be able to relate to that face." "As the therapist is talking and as the user is talking, AI is essentially analyzing what the user utters. We call them utterances. So based on that, the AI can tell when the patient is disengaging in session. The AI can tell when somebody's decompensating, it can recommend when a therapist should switch course. So there are so many possibilities in terms of how AI will work to give behavioral health so much more power in sessions." #UnitedWeCare #DigitalMentalHealth #MentalHealth #DrZereana #AI #GenerativeAI unitedwecare.com Download the transcript here