Empowered Patient Podcast

Stan Abel is the Chief Executive Officer of ProJenX, working on developing therapeutics to get into the brain to access the motor neurons that are dying in ALS and other brain and neurological diseases. Their drug prosetin is optimized to be bioavailable and administered in a small amount of liquid which is an advantage to someone living with ALS. Research is showing promise in increasing motor neuron survival in other neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's and perhaps Alzheimer's. Stan explains, "In ALS, we need the therapeutics to get into the brain to access the motor neurons where the pathology is taking place and where those motor neurons are dying. The team at Columbia actually optimized a family of compounds. Not only were they screening these drugs to see that they were neuroprotective, and in these ALS models, they could see that we were actually really improving the survival of motor neurons in vitro, which means basically in a Petri dish. They optimized the compound so that it would easily cross the blood-brain barrier." "These are two really important aspects. I think the advantage, in fact, that ProJenX has and prosetin has versus other programs that have been advanced in ALS is that this drug, all along the way, was based on ALS disease pathology. It was then was optimized to actually get into the brain and access the motor neurons that need the help." @ProJenX #ProJenX #ALS #ProjectALS #NeurodegenerativeDiseases #BrainDiseases #BloodBrainBarrier #ColumbiaUniversity projenx.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Stacia Woodcock is Clinical Cannabis Pharmacist at Curaleaf, which is bringing medical and adult use of cannabis to several states throughout the country.  Their model is to include a pharmacist in their dispensaries to educate practitioners and patients on the ways to use and manage cannabis products to address their concerns.  Curaleaf is also developing products that take a more nuanced view of the elements of the plant to explore how the use of minor cannabinoids can support everyday wellness and pain management without undesirable effects. Stacia explains, "So the Plant Precision line is five different formulations of the minor cannabinoids. The first one is CBG, which is cannabigerol, and CBG is a soothing anti-inflammatory. It can be really beneficial for people that have stomach issues, gut issues, and people that work out and want faster recovery from working out. It can help soothe all of that inflammation. It's for the active, involved person or someone who maybe has some stomach troubles, which we all do nowadays. Along with like a probiotic, it can be really beneficial for just soothing." "CBN gets a lot of attention. It's actually what happens to THC over time. It degrades into CBN. So that cannabinoid is really relaxing. It's associated with sleep and not in a way that leaves you hungover the next morning or gives you lower quality sleep. It helps you have a really nice restful sleep without, again, that intoxicating effect. So those are the sorts of things we're talking about with these minor cannabinoids and the different targeted use that they can have. That's a little bit different from when people think about traditional cannabis products." @Curaleaf_Inc #Curaleaf #Cannabis #CannabisMedicine #HolisticMedicine #CannabisWithConfidence #CannabisGummies  curaleaf.com Download the transcript here

Jason Matuszewski, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board, and Andrew Van Vurst, Chief Operating Officer of BioStem Technologies have a vision to change the paradigm on the use of perinatal tissue for advanced wound care. Their initial target is complex wounds in the lower extremity region, specifically focusing on diabetic foot ulcers, venous ulcers, and pressure ulcers using a perinatal tissue allograft to promote healing. Jason explains, "In general, non-healing and complex wounds share similar characteristics, high levels of protease, elevated inflammatory markers, low growth factor activity, and reduced cellular proliferation." "Chronic non-healing wounds are wounds that have failed to progress through a timely sequence of repair or proceed through the wound healing process without restoring anatomic or functional results. A large amount of these wounds add a huge burden on cost. Specifically, our initial market, Medicare patients, things of that nature, add up to the tune of almost $25 billion spent on healthcare systems treating these complex wound types." Andrew elaborates, "We've identified a process that we've acquired some IP around called BioRetain. Our goal with these tissues to set ourselves apart is not only to act as a protective barrier covering for the wound and the wound environment to create a healing environment but also to retain as much of the actual structural tissue components and biologic tissue components within the donated tissue we receive." @BSEM_Tech #BioStem #WoundHealing #ComplexWounds #SkinRegeneration #RegenerativeMedicine biostemtechnologies.com Download the transcript here

Sharon L. Rogers Ph.D. is the CEO of AmyriAD Therapeutics and has a deep understanding of the development of drugs to address the impact of Alzheimer's disease. Currently, the most common treatment is Aricept which Sharon developed and brought to market in 1996. Based on recent research, it does not appear that disease modification leads to clinical benefit or reduction in the progression of the disease. Sharon explains, "We're not doing anything that's going to modify the underlying progression of the disease, at least that we know of. This is a relentless disease, and sooner or later, it will run its course, and the outcome is ultimately fatal. But, we can buy time for people. Whenever you can improve function, you can reduce reliance on skilled nursing care. You can reduce reliance on the caregiver and the burden that it brings to the loved ones of the patients. You can prolong the time to nursing home placement, which is just really horrible for everyone involved, the families and the patients." "It is a simple tablet that will be administered once a day by mouth with just a little bit of water going with it. And as a matter of fact, this drug is designed to be administered as an adjunct to Aricept. Aricept is the standard of care. And so we want to maintain the Aricept treatment, but when you give AD101 on top of it as an oral drug, it increases the effects that were there before. So you'd have an additive improvement in cognition and global function." @AmyriAD_Tx #Alzheimersdisease #Alzheimers #AD #BrainHealth #MentalHealth #AlzheimersAwareness #MemoriesAreWorthFightingFor amyriadtherapeutics.com Download the transcript here

Jack Hoppin Ph.D. Chief Executive Officer and John Babich Ph.D., President and Chief Scientific Officer, and Co-Founders of Ratio Therapeutics aim to develop and produce best-in-class radiopharmaceuticals. Harnessing the power of radiation by making it into an injectable drug, Ratio is creating a way to find tumor cells anywhere in the body. John explains, "And what we are doing, which is quite unique, is creating a platform of small molecules that can be radiolabeled with a variety of different isotopes. And these radioactive isotopes carry the ability to deliver different types of radiation -- beta particles and alpha particles. They have different toxicities and different lengths, so they travel in the tissue. And by combining the right molecules for the delivery with the right isotope, we're hoping to optimize the ability to control the tumor to basically put it into remission while maintaining a high quality of life. And we do that latter component by making sure that the injected material doesn't go to normal tissues and damage normal tissues." "So we're trying to enhance the ratio of the delivery between the tumor itself and the normal tissues. The higher that ratio, the better off we are in being able to provide patients with a good treatment while maintaining a high quality of a life." Jack elaborates, "That's the uniqueness of the platform in terms of the market itself. John was a pioneer in this market, and he has been in the space for some time. It's really been known in the past, and it's not a novel concept. Radioactive iodines have been used for a long time, and there's been a class of drugs, a few drugs adopted, but in the last five years or so, we've seen a big boom in the adoption of targeted radiotherapies."   @Ratio_Tx #Ratio #RatioTx #RatioTherapeutics #Radioactive #Radiopharmaceuticals #cancer #onco #MathMeetsMedicine #Pharmokinetics #Tumor ratiotx.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Robert Ross is the CEO of Surface Oncology, which is focused on immune modulation in the treatment of cancers. Their hypothesis is that IL-27, a cytokine, is telling the immune system to ignore the cancer and providing a hiding place for the cancer cells. By administering their drug SRF 388 to bind up all the IL-27, the immune system can properly identify and fight the cancer. Robert explains, "SRF 388, all of these drugs, have such needlessly complicated names when they get started, but SRF 388 is an antibody. It's a protein that basically is trying to neutralize a cytokine. Cytokines are proteins in the body that the immune system uses to talk to other cells in the immune system. There are cytokines that stimulate the immune system, that make the immune system act more robustly, and there are cytokines that suppress the immune system. These are proteins that make the immune system go awry, for lack of a better word." "We know, and we've used for a long time, drugs to try to mimic the effect of cytokines that stimulate the immune system. Well, what we noted, and our scientific advisory board noted, was that in some patients with cancer and in some types of cancer, you saw the presence of this uncommon cytokine that we call IL-27." "IL-27 is a protein. It circulates in your body, but usually, there's very little of it, and in some patients with cancer, there are much higher levels of it. In the tumor itself, there are very high levels. Our hypothesis, our idea, was that it is possible that IL-27, that cytokine, was preventing the immune system from attacking the cancer." @SurfaceOncology #Immunotherapy #ImmunoOncology #Immunology #Cytokines #LungCancer #GastricCancer #StomachCancer #LiverCancer #KidneyCancer surfaceoncology.com Download the transcript here

Greg Frost is the Chairman and CEO of EXUMA Biotech, which is working on a cancer cellular therapy that can be administered in a patient without lymphodepletion from chemotherapy. Traditionally, it was thought that some cells needed to be eliminated before new cells could be introduced. EXUMA is working on a rapid point of care, rPOC, technology that will allow this approach to be expanded to various cancers and readily available to patients. Greg explains, "What we came to realize was that if we were to take our gene-loaded lymphocytes, and rather than putting them directly in the bloodstream, if we allowed them to start through what we call a synthetic lymph node or a local injection site, that those cells could get the programming and expansion where they were rather than just going straight in the bloodstream and every cell was diluted out into different locations in the body." "If they could start in one location together as a team, you had a much better chance of, when they would get into the lymphatics and build up through there, of having a stronger team to go in and fight the cancer. And importantly, also it makes it very effective for them to be able to amplify the gene programs that we have to get up into circulation without the need for lymphodepleting chemotherapy first." @EXUMABiotech #CellularTherapy #SolidTumors #BloodCancers #Chemotherapy #Lymphodepletion #Cancer EXUMAbio.com Download the transcript here  

Dr. Robert Gish is the Medical Advisor to Helio Genomics and the Medical Director of the Hepatitis B Foundation and is looking for answers to questions related to who is most at risk for liver cancer.  He is also working to improve blood testing to diagnose liver cancer earlier by looking for tumor material that shows methylated DNA changes. Robert explains, "So, one of the biggest messages I would have is the deficiency in surveillance for liver cancer. Screening is the first test, and surveillance is ongoing testing. Some people get confused with the word screening, unfortunately. We are not testing patients for liver cancer anywhere near what we should. Probably 20%, one out of five, people are getting proper surveillance when they're at risk for liver cancer." "Let's talk about at risk. That's a second message. Identifying people with risk, which is cirrhosis, 80%, 85% of people with liver cancer have cirrhosis, is also inadequate. We need to teach people how to find out if somebody has cirrhosis without doing a liver biopsy. We have great tools, but the education of the medical community and patient community needs to be much more robust, in my opinion." @HepBFoundation #HelioGenomics #CancerDetection #LiverCancer #BeatCancerEarly #Stage4NoMore hepb.org heliogenomics.com Download the transcript here    

Dr. Paul Peter Tak is the CEO and President of Candel Therapeutics, developing innovative immunotherapies for patients with solid tumors that are difficult to treat, like brain cancer, pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, and non-small cell lung cancer. This approach induces cell death in cancer cells at the site of injection, and it also trains cells to look for tumor cells migrating throughout the body. Paul Peter explains, "The approach we call oncolytic viral immunotherapy. The name already indicates that we use viruses here for a good purpose, actually, to treat cancer. And immunotherapy indicates that we try to activate the patient's own immune system to fight cancer at the site of the injection, as well as at the site of the un-injected distant metastasis. Basically, you can see it as a form of what we call in situ vaccination. In situ means at the place of the injection." "We kill the tumor cells at the site of the injection, and we do that in a way that's immunogenic. That means that we activate the immune system, and we create the optimal conditions at the site of the injection of the body's own immune system to start to recognize specifically the so-called cancer neoantigens. These are the molecules that are expressed on the surface of the cancer cells, and that can be recognized by these T cells. We call them cytotoxic T cells. The name already means that they're able to kill the tumor cells." #Candel #CandelTherapeutics #Candoers #CAN2409 #Immunotherapy #SolidTumors #Cancer candeltx.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Samantha Dale Strasser Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder at Pepper Bio, uses a transomic perspective with a global functional causal lens on genomic data to drive insights throughout the drug discovery process and identify the best treatments for patients. The goal is to go beyond the traditional understanding of diseases to unlock opportunities and solutions not considered in the past. Samantha explains, "So, I mentioned the genome is fantastic because it looks at instructions, but it looks at what can happen. It doesn't look at what is happening. And so looking up those data layers, bringing us to phosphoproteomics, brings functional context of fundamentally what proteins are doing and how that impacts disease and treatment selection." "The second facet that we drive forward here at Pepper is bringing a global context. So just kind of genomics itself is obviously a massive data set of hundreds of thousands of genes. But then you look at bringing in context from transomics, as well as proteomics and phosphoproteomics, all of those data layers we want to look at in their entirety. We don't want to pre-select a favorite pathway per se because we want to ensure that critical insights aren't missed. So with Pepper, again, the transomics approach brings global information to bear to ensure that we're capturing all of that critical biology at each data layer." @Pepper_Bio #DrugDiscovery #Genomics #Transomics #Proteomics #Phosphoproteomics Pepper.Bio Download the transcript here