Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Fahar Merchant, President, CEO, and Co-Founder of Medicenna Therapeutics, talks about the role cytokines play in managing the immune system, activating the system, or dampening the immune response depending on the circumstances. When the system is out of balance, pathogens and cancers can attack, or autoimmune diseases can occur. MDNA11 is an engineered cytokine or superkine which can be used to effectively deliver drugs to treat a range of solid tumors. in addition, MDNA11 is being fused with a checkpoint inhibitor to both stimulate the immune system and reverse the exhaustion of cancer-fighting immune cells. Fahar elaborates, "Engineered cytokines, or superkines, essentially have been designed so that these molecules are much more effective, they're much safer to administer, and therefore have better outcomes than naturally occurring cytokines. So naturally occurring cytokines tend to be rather small. They clear the kidneys very, very quickly, so they're not in the bloodstream for long enough." "The other thing is that some of these cytokines can be very toxic when administered in large quantities. Scientists at Stanford University looked at these cytokines. We'll talk about three cytokines, interleukin-2, interleukin-4, and interleukin-13, and thus engineered them in such a way that they can be much more effective, more potent, but at the same time much safer as well. So that's why we call them engineered. That's why we call them superkines because they are much more potent, much more powerful, than our own naturally occurring cytokines floating in our bloodstream." #Medicenna #Oncology #Cancer #Superkines #Cytokines #IL2 #Immunotherapy Medicenna.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Sachin Dev is a former physician and previous Gartner analyst, currently overseeing innovation and transformation in RGP's healthcare practice. Sachin points to the changes during the pandemic that were required for telehealth solutions to meet the needs of patients and providers. The technology necessary to build these systems into hybrid environments must take advantage of generative AI and automation with a focus on value-based care. Sachin explains, "When we look at it from our technology standpoint, we have seen some significant development in the technology. When we look at all the different innovations, especially in the healthcare industry, both on the payer and provider side, in the last two or three years since the pandemic, we have come along very well from a technology standpoint." "But, one thing that is lacking is the adoption. That's where, again, there's a big delta when we look at what kind of technology we have available today as to how that technology is utilized to improve patient care. There are a number of reasons why we lag from an adoption standpoint because, obviously, there's some financial pressure across our organizations." "When we look at our healthcare system, many organizations still have some sort of legacy tools or technology that they're currently using. It's a pretty big lift for the organizations to be able to get to a point where they're able to utilize all these new buzzwords or the high technology such as ChatGPT, generative AI, automation, hyper-automation in a way where they can translate the value of that technology in terms of patient care. Again, that has a significant impact on how that technology can be leveraged and utilized to further improve our patient care and the patient experience." #DigitalTransformation #RevenueCycleManagement #PatientExperience #HealthInnovation #HealthcareLeaders rgp.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Paulo Garcia, Co-Founder of Kytopen, is developing systems to refine the types of payloads, including RNA, DNA, and CRISPR-Cas RMP, that can be delivered to primary T cells, primary Natural Killer cells, and CD34 stem cells. To maximize the number of successfully engineered cells, the Flowfect Discovery technology, using a non-viral approach, automates the process of cell engineering and gene delivery into cells while dramatically reducing the time to produce the cells. Paulo explains, "One of the key differentiating aspects of our technology is that we are using a continuous fluid flow format for the engineering of our cells. This fluid flow contributes to the delivery of these payloads to the different cells. And to put it into perspective, the flow rates that we use are quite large. They are in the tens of milliliters per minute. And if you translate that into a throughput of cells, you're talking about being able to process anywhere between 1 to 2 billion cells in 30 seconds. And these are large quantities of cells that have the possibility of being able to be then used not only in an autologous setting but also in an allogeneic setting in which many cells have to be administered to the patients in the different doses that are required." "No technology currently processes at the high-volume rates we're talking about. And generally, what is done today is a batch process. There are non-viral techniques, and there are viral techniques, but what is required is for these cells to be introduced into a bioreactor divide, let them grow to the relevant numbers, and then they can be administered to the patients. And with a process that leverages the throughput of the Flowfect technology that Kytopen is developing, you can really reduce the time these processes take. And that is the vein-to-vein time, and reduce it to numbers that are measured in days as opposed to in weeks or months." "Right now, our goal is to shrink the time that it takes from discovery to process development and into clinical manufacturing with the Flowfect technology that leverages different types of energy, mechanical energy, electrical energy, and buffer chemistry to give the best outcome and chance of the cells to be engineered and modified for the therapeutic applications of our partners." #Kytopen #CellTherapy #ClinicalManufacturing #CellEngineering Kytopen.com Download the transcript here

Tuvik Beker, CEO, and Ranit Aharonov, CTO of Pangea Biomed, have designed ENLIGHT, a computational platform driving precision oncology that matches cancer tumors with available therapies. Drawing on an understanding of synthetic mortality and synthetic rescue, this approach focuses on how the interaction between genes increases or decreases the tumor cell's fitness and the likely response to a drug. Determining which populations might benefit most from a drug opens the door to new treatments for common and rare diseases. Tuvik explains, "When we match therapies to patients, just according to the pure genetic characteristics of the tumor, sometimes we miss potential therapies, and sometimes we give patients therapies that do not work very effectively. To solve that, we developed ENLIGHT, which looks at the broader characteristics of the tumor, not just at the target gene, but multiple interactions, and that way, we can find potential therapies that are missed by the current guidelines and common biomarkers." Ranit elaborates, "So when we search for these interactions between genes, we look at a lot of available cancer data. We have a large database of a lot of cell lines that were treated and human tumors, and we know the survival of the patients and so on, but we don't need to know anything about what drugs they got. Our algorithms allow us, by looking at a lot of correlations between different activations of genes and survival and what happens to cells, we are able to find what are the pairs in the entire genome of genes that their co-activation affects the fitness or the tumor survival. And by knowing this, you can think of it as a sort of vulnerability map of tumors." "One of the things I haven't yet described and I think wouldn't have happened without this revolution is that we can now move a step further. When we look at a patient's tumor, we don't necessarily need to measure the RNA expression or the activation of genes directly. We can look at the tumor through a microscope using standard histopathology slides, the ones with the bluish and pinkish coloring that have been used for decades and are really available everywhere." #PrecisionsMedicine #Oncology #PrecisionOncology #RareDisease #Biotech #Startup #AI #MachineLearning pangeabiomed.com Download the transcript here

Gloria Caulfield is the Vice President of Strategic Alliances for Tavistock and Executive Director of the Lake Nona Institute, which is part of the Lake Nona Life Sciences Innovation and Wellness Community. Lake Nona is a planned city within Orlando, Florida, that is focused on the health and well-being of the citizens who live and work there. One of the key economic drivers is the health and life sciences innovation cluster which includes the University of Central Florida College of Medicine, a VA Medical Center, and the Nemours Children's Hospital, a state-of-the-art pediatric healthcare system. Gloria explains, "There is no question that it's a collaborative community when you're building something this new and this unique. We have leaders of these institutions that have come from all different parts of the country to bring their careers here to focus on building this new ecosystem. It fosters a spirit of collaboration, which starts with Tavistock. Tavistock as the developer, we chair research councils and CEO councils and communication councils, and just a wide range of things to bring key leaders together just for that purpose." "One that I'll mention that's unique is the Lake Nona Performance Center, and the Lake Nona Performance Center is a medically integrated fitness facility. Again, going back to my initial comment that this whole community was built and designed with people, optimizing health and human potential is really at the forefront of our focus. This performance center is a nexus of multiple things. There's clinical care delivery, there's fitness services, there's sports performance, there's mind/body practices, all under one roof." "This community is the sum of the parts. We have these big anchor organizations, which I've mentioned. We have innovation centers. One of those is the leAD Accelerator. It's a joint venture between Tavistock Group, which owns Lake Nona, and the Adi Dassler family, the founders of Adidas. It was set up and explicitly designed to support some of the best young companies in the health and sports tech arena." #LakeNona #Healthcare #Innovation #Community #LifeSciences #Wellness #SportsMedicine #HealthcareInvesting Tavistock.com Download the transcript here

James McCullough, CEO of Renalytix, is focused on preventive care for those most likely to get chronic kidney disease. Diagnostics and risk assessment of patients earlier in the disease cycle emphasize maintaining kidney health rather than managing complications from late-stage kidney disease and kidney failure. Using a machine-learning algorithm to look at blood-based biomarkers and EMR data, the KidneyIntelX system provides the clinician with a risk score and guidelines for treatment. James elaborates, "There are five stages of kidney disease. We're focused on the early stages, so stages 1 through 3, before the majority of damage is done to the kidney. When you have therapeutic intervention, lifestyle intervention, you get specialist involvement, you have a pretty good shot at slowing or stopping the progression of the disease into the later stages, stages 4 and 5, where your options start to become limited." "With KidneyIntelX now, for the first time, we can start to see risk assessment taking place at the front end of the chronic disease with the primary care doctor. If you score high by KidneyIntelX, you are roughly 20 times more likely to experience significant kidney function decline over the next five years versus if you score low by KidneyIntelX. The stratification, for the first time, becomes a very powerful tool that we can implement very simply at the primary care level, where most people with early-stage kidney disease and diabetes are being seen." "This is an advanced prognosis. Prognosis is the key to controlling chronic disease, especially widespread chronic disease because you can't treat everybody. We know that probably close to half the people with kidney disease and diabetes aren't progressing over the next few years. The real question becomes because there are so many people with diabetes and kidney disease. and healthcare resources are limited, who do you treat? Who should you be concerned about now to be able to give drug treatments, specialist referrals, and significant lifestyle modifications?" @Renalytix #KidneyDisease #KidneyHealth #DIgitalHealth #AI #MachineLearning #Diagnostics renalytix.com Download the transcript here

Yarone Goren, Co-Founder and COO of SteadyMD powers telehealth for providers by providing the clinician workforce licensed in the states where the patients are located. Supported by behind-the-scenes clinical operations and patient interface, clinicians can give virtual care in addition to performing their traditional roles. With the growth in the demand for telemedicine, this solution provides a path for clinicians and digital health companies to meet the needs of patients for primary and disease-specific care and to manage chronic conditions on demand. Yarone explains, "What we do for a lot of our customers is provide the clinician workforce, the doctors, the nurses, the therapists, licensed, kind of a crazy Venn diagram of licensure across all the states where they need it. We do clinical operations, meaning we work closely with clinicians to schedule them to ensure that they appear for their scheduled shifts, train them on all the technology they need to use, and ensure that they meet all the clinical quality measures and SLAs." "Then the last piece is product and technology. Someone needs to provide the interfaces for the patients to sign up, to fill out their intake form, see their patient portal, and to schedule a follow-up appointment. We do a lot of that. We also do a lot of the product and tech for the clinicians, making it easy for them to do their job and efficiently handle visits across a handful of programs and modalities in all the states where they're licensed." "The challenge is to bring our expertise to the fore, support them in the way they need, and also help influence their product plans, product roadmap, and strategic thinking about this stuff. And it's definitely tricky to navigate. We also have a lot of customers. We do a lot of work in online urgent care, in condition-specific care, in online primary care, in lab ordering, lab order review and approval, and in online therapy as well. There are little differences in texture in all of those, but it's probably split pretty evenly. Folks come to us to design, build, and launch something from scratch, and then there are those who come to us and want help scaling and expanding." #Telehealth #DigitalHealth #Healthcare #VirtualHealth #VirtualCare #HealthcareInnovation #PoweringTelehealth steadymd.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Tariq Arshad is the Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at Qualigen Therapeutics, addressing multiple types of RAS-driven cancers. While researchers understand RAS's role in tumorgenesis and have identified which cancers are RAS-driven, RAS has been considered an undruggable target. With a pan-RAS approach inhibiting KRAS, HRAS and NRAS, the three isoforms of RAS, Qualigen is identifying drug candidates showing strong anti-tumor efficacy. Tariq elaborates, "That was so difficult to do because when you look at the KRAS protein itself, it's a complicated, three-dimensional structure that constantly changes. The opening, or the aperture, where a small molecule can attach and inhibit the G12C moiety or specifically the cysteine amino acid, which is targeted by these inhibitors, it appears for a very, very short period of time. It's nothing short of a miracle of bioengineering, and specifically medicinal chemistry that we've been able to identify these inhibitors that can target that subcomponent, that very small aperture within the overall KRAS protein, without, as you're saying, impacting the function of the overall protein." "The field is moving towards understanding why this lack of durability exists and is trying to understand whether it's due to the emergence of other mutations, whether it's due to the emergence of wild-type RAS, or whether it's due to other factors. One of the theories that is emerging behind the emergence of this KRAS resistance is the fact that there are other RAS isoforms that exist in the same tumor. They allow a mechanism in which the tumorigenesis can bypass KRAS, even though it's inhibited, and signal into the cell to convert it into a cancer cell. It now becomes important for us to understand how we can address that potential mechanism of resistance." #QualigenInc #RAS #KRAS #RASDrivenCancer #Cancer QualigenInc.com Download the transcript here

Patty Hayward, General Manager, Healthcare and Life Sciences at Talkdesk, is addressing staff burnout due to the increased demand for patient support and rising patient expectations to get questions answered, appointments scheduled, and issues resolved. Through AI, chatbots, and automation of basic tasks, staff can spend more time with patients to address complex problems. While some patients still like to talk to a live person on the phone, the use of technology allows for real-time responses to many concerns through a patient portal or contact center that has access to patient EMR including history and current medical condition. Patty explains, "People come into healthcare specifically because they want to help people. Healthcare is very personal, and so when you don't have the time and space and resources often to deliver that empathetic experience to really help people, that can lead to a real high level of burnout feeling, a lot of frustration, and you're not having that job satisfaction that you got into healthcare for." "Everyone can use Amazon. You can do the same thing here with certain aspects that are simple. So it's a matter of those low-hanging fruit, those things that are easy, getting people used to that, getting them used to being able to go to that as a first step as opposed to the phone and calling someone first." "But then also, okay, if they want to go voice, let's create chatbots that are on the phone that are voice virtual agents that allow us to have a conversation on the phone. Because sometimes it doesn't matter how many times you push people toward the computer, a lot of people are still going to call you." @Talkdesk #Talkdesk #EmployeeBurnout #PatientJourney #ContactCenter #PatientPortal #DigitalHealth #HealthcareIT #PatientExperience #HealthcareInnovation #Healthcare #AI talkdesk.com Download the transcript here

James Graham is the CEO of Recce Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company focused on the global antibiotic-resistant patient population. This new class of synthetic antibiotics takes a broad-spectrum approach to kill bacterial infections, which continue to mutate, rendering existing antibiotics ineffective. The founding inventor of Recce is Dr. Graham Melrose, the grandfather of James, who has grown this idea into one of the top-performing biotech stocks in Australia. James explains, "As you may know, by my accent, I'm an Australian. I think Australia found the first penicillin, which worked well for everyone around the world for a number of years. But it's time for a new penicillin, penicillin 2.0, or one entirely synthetic, not reliant on existing natural processes. And that's what we've fundamentally started with, beginning with the end in mind that is Recce antibiotics. So I really say the challenge, the silent pandemic is right upon us. You only have to look at the AMR resistance rates. I think raising at about 10% each year, certainly in certain antibiotic or indication groups. If we don't do something, we're just going to have these useless drugs that no one will pay the price for anyway. The business model will be broken, and everybody will be out of options. It's really the pandemic before us." "I hinted that R327 is synthetic. It's entirely synthetic when all existing antibiotics to date are naturally derived. So the way antibiotics and bacteria have always worked is that you find something in nature by way of the antibiotic. The bacteria are too smart. They evolve too quickly, and let's begin with the end in mind and create something that will work against all types of bacteria, gram-positive gram-negative in their hypercellular mutated forms, and keep on working with repeated use." "And in the case of my origins with Recce, the inventor, Dr. Graham Melrose, is actually my grandfather. He turned 90 years old about a little over a month ago, and he's the guy who was the head of Johnson & Johnson Australasia for about a decade. He is the foundational inventor of this compound. And he and I started this company. He's the inventor. I just gave him a bit of money, and off we went. That's the easy part. He started identifying the ideal compound in his garage in Perth in Western Australia. If anyone knows where that is, it's actually the most isolated city in the world." @ReccePharma #AntimicrobialResistance #AMR #SuperBugs #Sepsis #UTIs #Urosepsis #SyntheticAntiInfective #Antibiotics #AustraliaBioTech recce.com.au Download the transcript here