Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. David Huang is Senior VP and Chief Medical Officer at Peptilogics and working to change the approach for treating and reducing reinfection rates of periprosthetic joint infection, PJI. Their lead highly charged peptide PLG0206 has been shown to be broad spectrum and active against multi-drug resistant bacteria, common causes of PJI. Peptilogics' AI/ML platform is accelerating peptide discovery to reach better clinical candidates in therapeutic areas such as rare diseases, immuno-oncology, and immunology. David explains, "Peptilogics' approach to changing the treatment paradigm for treating PJI is by treating PJI directly at the site of infection. Instead of administering an antibiotic systemically or by mouth, as mentioned earlier, Peptilogics has an engineered cationic peptide and an irrigation solution that can be administered directly to the site of infection in the wound cavity of the knee, for example. The knee does not have a great blood supply. Therefore, antibiotics given intravenously or by mouth have a difficult time getting to the site of infection in the knee." "Peptilogics' lead peptide called PLG0206 is an engineered cationic antibacterial peptide, which has orphan drug QIDP, which stands for qualified infectious disease product, and fast track designation from the FDA. And the way that PLG works is by its novel mechanism of action. It selectively binds to and disrupts the integrity of the bacterial membrane by altering the physical characteristics of the membrane, leading to a rapid loss of the bacterial cell membrane potential that results in cell death." @Peptilogics #Peptilogics #PJI #PeriprostheticJointInfection #Peptides Peptilogics.com Download the transcript here

Virginia Halsey, Vice President of Product Management at FDB, First Databank, is focused on helping pharmacists use drug interaction information, drug alerts and dosage data in smarter, more efficient ways. WIth patient safety in mind, FDB is arming pharmacists with relevant content to determine the clinical impact of a specific drug on a specific patient. Virginia elaborates, "First Databank is drug content, but a very specific niche of drug content in that it is structured in such a way that it's built into the workflow of other systems. So, for instance, if a patient goes into a retail pharmacy, the pharmacist behind the counter is using their system to basically fill the prescription, adjudicate the claim, and so forth. But that drug content that's within their system comes from First Databank. Content that describes the products that are available, the pricing, and most importantly, clinical information about the drug, such as what's the appropriate dose or what are the drug interactions." "It's saving time, and it's addressing cognitive overload. So yes, the pharmacist can read this list of potential safety issues and interpret it, but there are a couple of problems. One is that then you have to take that time to sort through and think about the alternatives, maybe look something up. The other is, then, you get a lack of standardization because one pharmacist may come to one conclusion. Another may come to another conclusion instead of having standardized practice protocols and alternatives." @FDB_US #FirstDatabank #Pharmacy #Healthtech #Pharmacists #MedicationGuidance #HIT fdbhealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Jason Cohen, Senior Director of Clinical Solutions at Qventus, is addressing the problems that hospitals face regarding discharging patients. Much of care planning starts during hospitalization or at the last minute, so patients and caregivers are often left confused about the next appropriate care environment. Qventus is deploying AI to build a model with hundreds of different data points to predict highly-individualized discharge plans. This benefits patients, hospitals, and care teams by keeping track of progress, identifying bottlenecks, and making necessary adjustments to the care plan. Jason elaborates, "We look at patients, for example, who get an early discharge plan, which we define as being an estimated date of discharge and a disposition where they're likely to go. Those patients that have their care team aligned around that early plan by the second midnight in the hospital experience have significantly fewer excess days in the hospital. They're more likely to leave on time and get to their next most appropriate care environment, whether that's a skilled facility, rehab, home with home help, et cetera. And then on the other side of that, again, is that tension with the dynamically changing nature of that patient's health, and things can change from day to day." "Our solution has multiple different components, which hopefully we'll get into, but one of the core parts is our AI machine learning model that is able to help care teams align on that early discharge plan as soon as possible. And in the case of our models, the majority of patients, we're able to populate that plan directly into the EHR so that there's transparency across all those teams after the first midnight in the hospital." @Qventus #Qventus #HospitalDischargePlanning #HospitalDischarge #Hospitals #AI #BigData Qventus.com Download the transcript here

Robert Hoffman President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board at Kintara Therapeutics, is developing a drug to treat glioblastoma, the most common and deadliest form of brain tumor. The only drug temozolomide, TMZ, was approved in 1999 and the overall survival rate is very limited. The Kintara drug VAL-083 crosses the blood-brain barrier and is also showing promise for pediatric brain tumors and some ovarian cancers. Robert explains, "The mechanism of VAL-083 differs from other key chemotherapeutic agents, including TMZ. It induces interstrand cross-links at guanine N07, causing DNA double-strand break and cancer cell death. If you compare that to TMZ, it only induces a single-strand DNA break at N07, and the tumor cells can repair them. That's really an important distinction of our mechanism of action. So, we're really, really excited." "So, I could imagine once it's approved, physicians would potentially combine it with TMZ, potentially which still may happen. Or Avastin, potentially. So, yes, there is a possibility for that. We're looking at, coincidentally, ovarian cancer with VAL-083 with some PARP inhibitors. So, there are other potential combinations that we're looking at down the road, as well." "Another underserved area is pediatric brain tumors. We're looking at DIPG, which is a pediatric indication, as well as medulloblastoma" @Kintara_Thera #Kintara #GBM #Glioblastoma #Cancer #BrainCancer #BrainTumor kintara.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Sean Bohen, President and CEO of Olema Oncology, is looking for a better endocrine option, alone or in the context of a CDK 4/6 inhibitor, to treat ER-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer. Their oral pill OP-1250 does not have chemotherapy-like side effects and could be better tolerated than chemotherapy to aggressively target and turn off the estrogen receptor. Sean explains, "In that respect, I'd say the estrogen receptor is probably one of the most validated therapeutic, molecular therapeutic targets in cancer, with tamoxifen first being approved in 1977. That said, that progress here has been relatively slow. Tamoxifen, approved in 1977, is not a complete antagonist. It turns on the receptor in some contexts, and turns it off in others. Fulvestrant is a complete antagonist. It has to be injected. That was approved in the early 2000s, and here in 2022, we're still working on getting a better estrogen-receptor targeting therapy." "What happens, as is often the case in cancers, is that the ER-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer cell co-ops that normal growth and proliferation signal to promote an abnormal growth and proliferation of the cancerous cells. So that's why we are able to go back and try to turn that signal off and help treat the cancer, prevent progression and, sometimes, cause regression of the tumors by turning off that inappropriately-used estrogen receptor signal." "We are currently treating three cohorts, 50 patients with measurable tumors, 15 patients without measurable tumors. In the context of ER-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer, that is usually bone-only involvement. Then we also have an interesting property with OP-1250. It crosses the blood-brain barrier, so which raises the possibility of being able to treat brain metastases. We have a cohort of 15 central nervous system metastasis patients that we are working on enrolling right now." #OlemaOncology #Oncology #BreastCancer #WomensHealth #SERD #CERAN olema.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Tim O'Connell is a practicing radiologist and CEO and Co-Founder of Emtelligent, a medical natural language processing company. Their software converts unstructured text in medical documents into structured data to allow a variety of clients to get access to information that in the past has not been available. Tim explains, "The problem was that the NLP engine just wasn't good enough. If there was a family history item, it would misidentify it as belonging to the patient. Sometimes it would get negation wrong, and it would miss important terms or have a hard time dealing with ambiguous words or acronyms. I knew that the premise was correct. As a clinician, I needed better access to patient data, and I needed access to the unstructured data, but I needed a better NLP engine in order to get it." "What we've done is really brought together medical experts and NLP experts and built a system that understands the very unique medical language. Just to take one example, you take something as simple as the word PT. It could mean patient. It could mean physiotherapy. It could mean physiotherapist. It could mean prothrombin time. It could mean posterior tibial, referring to a tendon or a blood vessel. So, dealing with these very special and unique problems, you need to do it on a medical basis." @emtelhealth #Emtelligent #NLP #MNLP #MedicalNaturalLanguageProcessing #UnstructuredText emtelligent.com Download the transcript here

Marcus Dorstel Head of Operations at Turquoise Health, is part of a team of engineers and healthcare experts focused on the price transparency data that started coming out in 2021 on the hospital side and in July 2022 on the payer side. These prices were previously kept secret and in data silos so that the full picture of costs was not possible. Their aim is to support the No Surprises Act, which requires providers to create a good faith estimate of all medical services ahead of actual service. Marcus explains, "At Turquoise Health, ultimately, we want to simplify the way healthcare gets paid. I think we're all keenly aware of the complexities of the healthcare space, a lot of that around the payment structure and even just what the price of healthcare is. And so, we're a startup focused on price transparency in the healthcare space and helping all parties within the healthcare ecosystem really simplify those payments and bring more transparency into healthcare." "Hospitals are certainly taking a look at their prices compared to their competitors. There's a chance to see if you're contracting with a major national carrier and what they're paying your competitor down the street. We're already seeing that this data is being used by both hospitals and also by the payers in these contract negotiations." @TurquoiseHC #TurquoiseHealth #PriceTransparency #Healthcare #NoSurprisesAct #GoodFaithEstimate #Hospitals #HealthcareCosts #MedicalBills turquoise.health Download the transcript here

Nate Maslak is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ribbon Health, which is a healthcare data platform to power patient care decisions, including price transparency for all services. Their unique technological approach incorporates data from across the entire healthcare ecosystem. It uses predictive analytics, AI, and machine learning to determine accurate information while allowing patients to contribute data back into the system. Nate explains, "The overall technology focuses on being able to provide the right information on a provider at the right moment in time, so whenever/wherever somebody's seeking care. And the number of problems that exist in provider data is shocking, and sometimes I feel like they are infinite. So just starting with something as basic as the provider directory, so phone numbers, addresses. What is the specialty of this provider?" "That information out there today is about 45% accurate, which is terrifying because that doesn't even start to hit on some other elements that are hard to get across. So Ribbon helps solve that. We're also then enabling other solutions to be able to show which insurance plan a given provider accepts down to the plan name and network level. And then, we layer on provider performance and cost-effectiveness, and price transparency." @RibbonHealthAPI #RibbonHealth #Healthcare #DigitalHealth #MedicalBills #AffordableHealthcare #PriceTransparency #HealthcareProviders #Healthtech #MachineLearning #AI #EmpoweringPatients RibbonHealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Shafiq Rab is the Chief Digital Officer and System Chief Information Officer at Tufts Medicine and an advocate for cloud-based health ecosystems. Healthcare is one of the last industries that has not moved into the cloud to integrate the entire ecosystem of patient data, clinical trial updates, provider information, and payer processes and allow for research and advanced analytics. The cloud provides the flexibility to scale operations and reduce costs related to physical space and administration. While it is hard to get the variety of electronic health record databases and applications to work together, it is even harder to get the humans involved to adjust to new technologies in the workplace. Shafiq explains, "So in the world that we live in, where everybody wants an Amazon-like experience, healthcare has to go a little forward. On paper, things are still a little less efficient. To make that happen, there are three stages that everybody has to go through. One is digitizing everything, then digitalization, and finally, digital transformation, which is a cultural thing." "Why into the cloud? That ecosystem means all the applications that you want to use to deliver healthcare. You have it in a place in the cloud because the cloud has the computing power. It allows you to compute things faster and quicker. In the world of healthcare, the consumer consumes on a phone, on an iPhone or Android, at the edge, which is known as edge computing. The connectivity depends upon the strength of the internet and the interoperability between the different systems. So, if you do not have an ecosystem up in the cloud with your major electronic health record, it becomes hard to deliver that information." "We also benefited by decreasing the number of portals for our patients, for our consumers. We now have one app. Before, we had about 84 different portals and different ways of getting the information, and it was not in one place. So the North Star is how to make it easier and more welcoming, the access to care for the consumers and the communities we serve. Simultaneously, making it also easier for care providers to provide the care, and the employees who work here, and the vendors who are part of the ecosystem, because that's how we complete the ring of healthcare." @TuftsMedicine @CIOSHAFIQ #TuftsMedicine #DrShafiqRab #AWS #DigitalHealth #HealthIT #HealthTech #Cloud #EHR #DigitalTransformation #HealthcareInnovation #DigitalHealthEcosystem #PatientExperience tuftsmedicine.org Download the transcript here

Dr. Harvey Kaufman is the Senior Medical Director at Quest Diagnostics and Director of the Quest Diagnostics Health Trends Research, and he raises the alarm about the impact of delayed diagnostic testing for cancer due to the disruption of the COVID restrictions. While progress has been made on more effective treatments, early-stage cancer diagnoses significantly contributed to the 32% decline in cancer deaths between 1991 to 2019. The delay in cancer screening can turn one public health crisis caused by the pandemic into another crisis, with more advanced-stage cancers requiring more aggressive therapy and having worse outcomes. Quest Diagnostics is the leading provider of diagnostic testing services and information in the United States and a leader in cancer diagnoses and testing. Harvey explains, "We looked at people who had missed testing for diabetes, chlamydia, gonorrhea, hepatitis, and a host of other conditions, including cancer. And we showed that in the early months of the pandemic, particularly March, April, and May of 2020 when a lot of healthcare was shut down other than for caring for COVID-19-affected individuals. During that early period, it was hard to get care because everyone was in essence, shut down. And sure enough, there were dramatic declines in people who were diagnosed with a host of conditions, including cancer." "Now, there was a study done in Japan, clearly different patients, clearly different approach. And they found virtually the same thing that in the early part of 2020, there was a 30% decline in newly identified patients with cancer. And that in early 2021, there was a 17% decline, matching our data, confirming that different approaches and different countries had the same impact from the pandemic." #QuestDiagnostics #CancerDiagnostics #CancerScreening #COVID #Pandemic #CancerDeaths questdiagnostics.com Download the transcript here