Empowered Patient Podcast

Bronwyn Spira, CEO and Co-Founder at Force Therapeutics, allows provider groups, physical therapists, doctors, and nurses to reach out to patients no matter where they are, using virtual tools to expand access to care. Experience during the pandemic demonstrated that patients of all ages are eager to use digital means to address pain and recovery issues on their own time. Virtual orthopedic care also enables providers to be more efficient and helps to address staff shortages and burnout. Bronwyn explains, "Physical therapy that's involved in treating orthopedic conditions is a much healthier way, and a non-opioid dependent way, of combating pain. But also the solution lies in understanding the data." "A lot of the work that we've done has been around how our patients that are prescribed opioids are recovering differently from those who have an opioid-sparing pain protocol. Once you have that data, you can actually make a broader change to best-practice protocols. And, of course, that has an outsized impact on opioid dependence in a community." "This can reach any patient, including patients in rural communities, patients who cannot afford their copays or their commuting costs, and even patients with mobility issues. Virtual care, when constructed in a way that's validated and delivered by the provider organization, overcomes many barriers to access to care but also provides better digital care in many cases." #HealthEquity #HealthDisparities #DigitalHealth #DigitalCare #VirtualCare #PatientOutcomes #PhysicalTherapy #OrthopedicCare #Orthopedics #SDoH #Opioids #PatientEngagement #Telemedicine forcetherapeutics.com Download the transcript here

Akihiro Ko is the CEO and Co-Founder of Elixirgen Therapeutics, which was founded with the mission of treating patients using RNA technology. Their c-srRNA, controllable self-replicating RNA, technology is being applied to telomere biology disorders where patients have inherited short telomeres and a failure to develop bone marrow. Elixirgen is looking to restore the ability to create blood cells in patients suffering from this rare disease. Akihiro explains, "We are harnessing the tremendous potential of our controlled self-replicating RNA technology to redefine stem cell therapies for patients using the ZSCAN4 gene. We are working on potentially groundbreaking treatments for difficult-to-treat, rare, and genetic diseases, starting with the hematopoietic system and then going out into more indications." "And our unique technology is that it is controllable in that it is optimized for expression at 30-35 ℃ and inactivated at temperatures at and above 37 ℃. And what that enables us to do is basically tune the expression of this self-replicating RNA. What is great is that self-replicating RNA has been known for its very long and also basically strong expression. However, it has been uncontrolled.  So, we bring that control with this unique temperature-controlled system." "So telomere biology disorders are a group of known diseases, and they are defined by these patients having inherited short telomeres and accelerated shortening of those telomeres over time. It is a rare disease, and the most common issue for the patients is that by the age of 30, around 80% of them develop bone marrow failure, which is a very serious condition." "What this bone marrow failure entails is that their hematopoiesis, their ability to create new blood cells from their bone marrow, decreases over time. The reason for that is that the telomeres in their hematopoietic stem cells are shorter, and this reduces their ability to do so." @ElixirgenTx #CellTherapy #RareDiseases #Telomeres #TelomereBiologyDisorders #RNATechnology Elixirgentherapeutics.com Download the transcript here

Rich Parker, MD Chief Medical Officer at Arcadia, is working with large healthcare providers to provide data analytics to address the needs of large populations of patients and very specific groups facing unique challenges. The goal is to get the signal-to-noise ratio correct as quickly as possible to, for example, efficiently develop successful COVID vaccinations and identify which patients need help first in an emergency. More refined stratification of patients is also revealing at-risk patients who may have been missed in earlier analyses of social determinants of health. Rich explains, "So the data comes from so many disparate sources that we need companies like Arcadia that aggregate data to do the work. The data is coming from claims from payers, the data is coming from electronic health records, data is coming from public sources, and data is coming from manufacturers of vaccines. So all that data has to be put together, aggregated, cleaned up, and then made usable for interpreting for clinical trials to determine whether a new vaccine is safe and effective." "Every function within a hospital, every ambulatory healthcare function, it's all data-driven. And then, if we move over into the research world, and research often takes place within healthcare entities. Some of our customers, which are academic medical centers, have large research arms. They are involved with the National Institute of Health and the Center for Disease Control. So there's a lot of overlap between healthcare organizations, industry, the federal government, and state departments of health. We all have the same goals in mind, which is improving the health of the population. And all of those endeavors are data-driven." @ArcadiaHealthIT #HealthOutcomes #PopHealth #PopulationHealth #SDoH #DataAnalytics #DataPlatform arcadia.io Download the transcript here

Tuvik Beker, CEO of Pangea Biomed, is looking for more accurate biomarkers for oncology to determine better who might benefit from a specific drug. Their ENLIGHT platform is a pan-cancer, pan-treatment response predictor and can be used to find the best patient populations to give a new drug. They are also working with bio-pharma companies on improving the identification of novel targets through better biomarkers, better patient stratification, and combination therapy optimization. Tuvik elaborates, "Rather than looking at the genome and looking for abnormalities in gene coding, those rare fusions, or actionable mutations, what Pangea is doing is looking at the way genes are activated in the tumor." "And this turns out to be a much, much more common abnormality in cancer tumor cells. So almost any tumor cell that you would examine, you would find hundreds and even thousands of genes that are normally encoded. So they have no mutations, they are wild-type genes, and yet they are abnormally expressed in the tumor compared with normal tissue. And the question is, of course, how do we harness this common abnormality of expression into effective therapies? So, there is where our technological uniqueness comes in." "And that's really what we are hoping for in the long run because ENLIGHT is not only a way to say generally, qualitatively, whether a particular drug would be good or not. It can actually rank and compare different therapies in a way that gives the treating physician a very clear map of what the available treatments are and what should be considered or is the ultimate decision a clinical one. So we are just dealing with treatment elimination but in a very informed manner." @BekerTuvik @PangeaBiomed #PrecisionMedicine #Oncology #PrecisionOncology #Biotech #Startup pangeabiomed.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Ira Spector is the CEO and Co-Founder of SFA Therapeutics, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company leading the way as a fourth-generation microbiome company to treat inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The first microbiome companies focused on fecal transplants, while the next innovation was probiotics. The third generation took the understanding of the bacteria in the GI microbiome to derive bacteria for each patient. SFA is asking what the bacteria make and their physiological function in order to synthetically make those substances as an effective small molecule drug. Ira explains, "The immune system in the human body is regulated up and down by messengers called cytokines. And long before cytokine storm and COVID came about, we were researching how to control these signals in the body. In particular, what we found is that there are cytokines related to these autoimmune diseases. It turns out that when you do a review across a range of autoimmune diseases, you find the same four or five cytokines related to those diseases over and over and over again. And what we have found are substances normally made in the GI by bacteria that can be turned into drugs that regulate or modulate these immune system signals and return the immune system to normal." "We believe that these have the potential to be used to treat a range of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Our analogy is just as insulin was revolutionary for Type 1 diabetics because they couldn't make sufficient insulin themselves, that patients with these diseases often lack the ability to make these substances. By providing them exogenously as a drug, we can take their immune system back to normal and reduce the inflammation associated with these autoimmune diseases." @TherapeuticsSfa #SFATherapeutics #Microbiome #AutoimmuneDisease #Inflammation #Psoriasis #ImmuneSystem sfatherapeutics.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Jula Inrig is the Chief Medical Officer of Travere Therapeutics and is eager to find innovative treatments for rare kidney diseases, which can be challenging to diagnose and have limited therapeutic options. In clinical trials, their lead candidate, sparsentan, reduces proteinuria significantly in patients with IgA Nephropathy and focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS). Travere is working with the U.S. Preventive Task Force to encourage earlier diagnosis and screening for these often silent diseases. Jula explains, "We've mapped out a path to get therapies approved for trying to avoid really what is one of the most detrimental complications of kidney disease, which is kidney failure, where you essentially wind up on dialysis. This is a treatment option where patients need to go into a clinic and be hooked up to a machine which cleans their blood three times a week. Or the other option is transplantation. One of the things that we have worked on is a molecule called sparsentan to try and avoid kidney failure." "Sparsentan is an investigational product candidate. It is a single molecule that doesn't suppress the immune system, which I think for a lot of our patients that's very important. It blocks two hormones that are in the path of causing damage within the kidney. What we have found with sparsentan is it reduces the pressure within the kidney, and it causes some remodeling within the kidney that reduces leakage of protein. When you leak protein within your kidney, that causes the kidney to then not clear toxins and then ultimately to progress faster causing kidney failure." @TravereRare #TravereTherapeutics #RareDiseases #RareKidneyDisease #KidneyDisease Travere.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz, CEO of KeyCare Medical, is listening to consumer feedback and helping health systems provide more virtual care options, particularly for routine types of care. At the same time, KeyCare is working with providers on a strategy that enables them to come up with a plan to care for patients with higher complexity that requires them to be seen in the office. The key to success is the systems integration and data sharing that is possible with this virtual care approach. Lyle explains, "I think virtualists and virtual care technology need to be different in various ways from traditional office-based care, in a good way. It needs to focus on a more routine set of problems. It needs to be done in a highly efficient manner to be convenient and less expensive while maintaining quality." "So with KeyCare, we are providing access to a tech-enabled virtual care workforce to health systems, and we're doing it all on Epic. So we have our own instance of Epic that we're staffing with virtualists. We're mainly working with health systems who also have Epic so that they can feel they've got a partner that is able to work cohesively with them." "In terms of partnering with health systems, the competition is usually third parties who've developed their own proprietary telehealth-focused technology. That, unfortunately, doesn't integrate well with respect to both workflow or data sharing in health systems. That's why we decided to work with Epic because they have a very mature electronic health record system. They now have a mature telehealth system, and they have a level of interoperability between Epic sites that is unseen anywhere else." #KeyCareMedical #DigitalHealth #VirtualHealthCare #Telehealth #Virtualists #Epic keycare.org Download the transcript here

Dr. Leslie Soiles is the Chief Audiologist at HearingLife, which provides hearing care through professionals who conduct hearing assessments at physical locations and make recommendations for the appropriate way to treat hearing loss. With advancements in nanotechnology and the availability of over-the-counter hearing aids, there are more opportunities to address hearing loss. Still, there are many issues to be aware of when using those devices. Leslie explains, "Over-the-counter hearing aids are designed for people with mild to moderate hearing loss. Over-the-counter hearing aids don't require a hearing test to be performed, so if somebody thinks that they might be a candidate for OTC, over-the-counter hearing aids, I really do recommend that they first start with that hearing test to make sure that their need falls within the standard of what an over-the-counter hearing aid is designed for." "In HearingLife, we recommend people start at age 60, and that provides that baseline measurement. As those statistics that I mentioned earlier indicate, going forward from that point, the likelihood of hearing loss is very high. And so, if you can just start monitoring the status of your hearing because it does progress slowly. Having an annual hearing test starting at age 60 gives you that yardstick to measure as you go forward so that you aren't surprised by it." "For the first time ever, we have patients that have normal hearing, but they love the Bluetooth streaming capability that current hearing aids have. And so, I've had people with normal hearing saying, "Hey, I wish I could wear hearing aids too." That was unheard of before." @HearingLife #HearingLife #HearingHealth #Audiology #HearingAids #OTCHearingAids hearinglife.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Sherry McAllister is a practicing chiropractor and President of the Foundation for Chiropractic Progress which recently commissioned a Harris Poll about physical and mental health. One of the most concerning findings was that the link between physical and mental pain was strongest in survey participants 35-44 years old. Geographic location was also a factor, as was the sharp difference in how men and women respond to pain. Treating the mind and the body is essential for good health, and F4CP promotes guidelines that emphasize that non-pharmaceutical options for pain treatment should be the first choice, not the last resort. Sherry explains, "What we learned was that half of the US adults, just about 44%, actually reported that they had experienced physical pain that they believe was worsened due to mental or emotional pain. We now know there's a link between mental health and physical pain. It's been well-established in the healthcare community. Still, the past two years have really broadened the public's understanding of this association and how managing one condition without treating the other can be counterproductive." "I think we need to identify and we need to manage all the root causes of conditions that really create havoc in the bone, the nervous system, the muscle, and the mind. And I think when we look back at that Harris Poll, it'll hopefully remind us and inspire healthcare professionals that they can approach every patient holistically to help them achieve their optimal goal. And that's kind of where I sit. If you want to learn more about mental-physical health connections, we have a fantastic book. It's called Depression, Dopamine, and Drug-Free Interventions: How Chiropractic Care Is Supporting Mental Health, and we can share that with you." @F4CP #ThinkChiropractic #ChiropracticCare #Chiropractor #MentalHealth #PhysicalPain Find Sherry's podcast, Adjusted Reality, where you get your podcasts F4CP.org Download the transcript here

Mehdi Maghsoodnia is the CEO of 1health and is determined to bring advanced diagnostic medical tests to a broader audience to enable more patients to benefit from precision medicine advancements. Too often, patients are put on costly drugs that are not effective. Using data from advanced testing allows clinicians to diagnose conditions more accurately and to determine the best treatment approach. Mehdi elaborates, "Where we focus is really more on how do we make these advanced diagnostic tests cheaper and faster, so we can introduce more accurate, clean data into that care pathway. You want to know very quickly, very accurately, all that you need to know about the specifics of the patient, the specifics of their genetics, and the specifics of the potential tumor type, interaction with drugs, and so on and so forth. Those are the types of information we are trying to deliver into the care decision pathway very quickly." "That data set is building up very rapidly because we've been sequencing patients, and we've been tracking the impact of the drug on those patients. Now, those databases are coming to the clinical market. They're not there today everywhere, so unfortunately, you might get the best pharmacogenomic results in some of the advanced institutions in urban areas, like San Francisco and New York, but you don't get it everywhere." "Part of our push on the pharmacogenomic side is to make sure that it's available and accessible by everybody. Health equity is a big issue right now. We are making sure that the test is not only affordable, but it's easy to order, and it's easy to include in the healthcare pathway for every patient at every point in the care system." @ihealthio #1health #PrecisionMedicine #AdvancedDiagnostics #DiagnosticTesting #CancerDetection #Pharmacogenomic 1health.io Download the transcript here