Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Alice Martin is the Co-Founder of Dermanostic, the largest teledermatology resource in Europe. Their vision is to give access to a dermatologist to everyone worldwide with a rapid diagnosis and suggested therapy, including prescriptions. While many skin conditions are not life-threatening and are often seen as unimportant by physicians, they impact the quality of life and are treatable. Alice explains, "We have a lot of patients with skin cancer, white and also black skin cancer melanoma, for example, and it's so easy to just make the pictures because we can see the criteria for malignancy. The patients don't want to go to the appointment because they don't have any symptoms. It's just skin, the area that is growing, and by having such easy access, they are sending the pictures. They are getting the diagnosis before it's starting to make any metastases." "So the application is available, for example, on the Apple Play Store or Google Play Store, and you can download it in your language. It's also available in English and after you are downloaded that application, you can just take three pictures of the area, for example, something on your skin or your hair and also on your nail. Afterward, you're getting a very small questionnaire, like since when do you have this problem? Does it hurt? And do you have any allergies or something like that? And then you are making the registration process, and afterward, you are making the payment process." "And normally it takes two to four hours and that time you can just enjoy your free time and our physicians are getting the pictures and the questionnaire, and on this basis, they are making the diagnosis, and the treatment and they are sending back a doctor's letter in PDF. Also, the prescription and the patient can get the prescription by just clicking on the button. So in Europe, it's working all over all European countries. Of course, we are also working on the other countries to get good access to the pharmacist and so on, but for the first step here in Europe it's working quite well." #Dermanostic #DermatologistApp #Teledermatology #Dermatology #Dermatologist #DigitalHealth #Germany dermanostic.com Download the transcript here

Patty Hayward is the Vice President of Industry Strategy for Healthcare and Life Sciences at Talkdesk which is working with payer and provider organizations, life sciences companies, and other clients in the healthcare and life sciences areas.  Its mission is to synchronize data streams so that there is a convenient way for care providers and patients to receive healthcare information and services using their channel of choice. Patty elaborates, "People are really looking for that kind of convenience, and I think that's a radical shift from where we've been in the provider space, where it's really, you hang a sign outside and people came to you. You didn't do as much of the big outreach and marketing unless you were in really congested marketplaces. Even then it was very traditional in how you went about marketing." "I think today that's really shifted. A lot of folks that we're talking to are really looking to digitize their contact centers, digitize their patient experience, and trying to look at things in a very different way to allow different kinds of conversations and communication styles." #Talkdesk #ContactCenter #DigitalHealth #Healthcare #HealthcareInnovation #HealthcareIT #PatientExperience Talkdesk.com Download the transcript here

Terry Weber is the CEO of BioTE and is on a mission to educate medical professionals about the need to address the hormone levels in patients as they age. With a personalized approach, BioTE focuses on providing hormone therapy to help patients maintain their quality of life and not just be dismissed as getting old when they report discomfort, sexual dysfunction, and loss of muscle mass.   Terry explains, "At BioTE we don't just do hormone treatment. We try to optimize the individual's hormones, and that would be estrogen and testosterone, both for men and women. Testosterone's very important for women. Also, looking at the thyroid and adrenals. What we look to see is how do we balance those hormones in the individuals so that they really feel their absolute best. We take blood tests, and we have very in-depth questionnaires because everyone's reaction to hormone levels is very personal." "BioTE's history has been to focus on putting a light on testosterone for women because it's such a critical hormone. Most people assume that testosterone is just for men, and that's not true at all. What BioTE has brought to the market is a real focus on women's needs and the need for testosterone in women's bodies and how important that is in the long run for their general health. We've been disruptive in that way." #BioTE #HealthyAging #WomensHealth #HormoneTherapy #Hormones #HormonalInbalance #Testosterone #Estrogen BioTE.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Diem Nguyen is the CEO of Xalud Therapeutics, a DNA delivery gene therapy company striving to develop and deliver medicines for large, broad-based disease indications like chronic inflammatory diseases, particularly musculoskeletal diseases like osteoarthritis of the knee and as well as neurodegenerative diseases like MS and ALS. Earlier in her career, Diem was the global President of Pfizer, covering multiple therapeutic areas, and has joined Xalud because of their ground-breaking DNA delivery platform. Diem explains, "Gene therapy means a lot of things to a lot of people. And the first, I would say, is most people, when they think about gene therapies, think about viral AAV gene therapy. And a lot of promise is associated with that type of platform because you're seeing this potential, particularly in rare diseases. The challenges associated with AAV sometimes are the safety profile associated with that product. Our particular gene therapy is DNA gene therapy, so we do not have the challenges with genome integration, which allows us to have a potentially stronger safety profile." "I want to be very clear when I say disease modification because it can mean many things from a definition perspective to different audiences. What I want to say specifically about our product, XT-150, is we're not looking to treat pain associated with osteoarthritis of the knee by just blocking the pain or masking the pain. What we're trying to do is help your body restore homeostasis." "What we're saying is we're supplementing your body with interleukin-10, which then allows you to have your body naturally reduce pro-inflammatory cytokines, which then reduces the inflammation." #XaludTherapeutics #GeneTherapy #InflammatoryDiseases #Cytokines #Inflammation #Osteoarthritis #NeurodegenerativeDiseases #ALS #MS XaludThera.com Download the transcript here

Sabrina Johnson is the Founder, President, and CEO of Daré Bioscience. Sabrina points out that there are several unmet needs in women's health and that many of the indications or conditions that women are dealing with are not life-threatening but affect their quality of life. Applying technologies created by smaller companies and academic institutions, Daré aims to become a pipeline for companies that have a global commitment to improving women's health. Sabrina explains, "Our business model is to really be that innovation accelerator that starts with finding and identifying that persistent unmet need. And that's where we start. What is that condition that is not adequately addressed today for her? Developing a target product profile, what would the product look like that might be best suited to address that condition for her? We then go out and look for a technology that has a proof of concept that it should address that and hit that target product profile. We bring that into Daré into our portfolio. We advance it through development, and then ultimately, we seek to bring that product to market in whatever way makes the most sense for that product. And sometimes that's going to be by being that pipeline resource to companies like Bayer and Organon. And I mentioned both of those because we have a collaboration with each of them now." @DareBioscience #WomensHealth #GenderInequality #Healthcare #ReproductiveHealth #SexualHealth #Biotech #DrugDevelopment darebioscience.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Kimberly Kilby is the Vice-President and Medical Director of Health and Wellbeing at MVP Health Care. Trained as a family and preventive physician, Kimberly is focused on the patient journey and expanding the options for virtual care. MVP collaborates with virtual care providers and other digital health solutions, supporting virtual primary care, urgent care, chronic care management, and specialty care. Kimberly explains, "We want to be sure that patients are finding options for virtual care that are actually high-quality medicine but also thoughtfully integrated into the rest of their care continuum. That's part of the professional reason why a physician is dedicated to that key customer experience as you expand options in the virtual care space." "A lot of the data is showing that patient and consumer preferences within healthcare have obviously changed dramatically, and patients are looking for more convenience and availability. And I'm really charged with determining which of the innovative options people are migrating to are actually high value and improve care and don't really add waste to the system." @MVPHealthCare #DigitalHealth #Telemedicine #VirtualPrimaryCare #VirtualUrgentCare MVPHealthCare.com Download the transcript here

Mai-Britt Zocca is the Founder, CEO, and President of IO Biotech, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Denmark. They are developing immune modeling cancer therapies based on their T-win technology. Using these cancer vaccines, pre-existing T-cells are being directed in patients to attack and eliminate solid tumors. Mai-Britt explains, "Currently, we have a leading program that is in Phase 3. So, this is in first-line advanced melanoma. We have a breakthrough therapy designation granted by the FDA, based on the earlier data that we have seen in melanoma. Our targets also are able to be used in other cancer indications. We are not melanoma per se. We are already running trials in first-line solid tumors where we are including also lung, head, neck, and bladder cancer." "What we do is vaccinate, as I mentioned before, and the vaccination process is a combination of first a booster program, where we give vaccination or injections several times. Then we have a maintenance phase after that. This is where we see that after these vaccinations, where we vaccinate against the tumor environment, we generate the T-cells that can react towards the immune suppressive mechanisms that we know are hindering the effect of the T-cells in these patients." #IOBiotech #Melanoma #CancerVaccine #Immunotherapy #Cancer #ImmunoOncology IOBiotech.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Hernan Bazan is the CEO and Co-Founder of South Rampart Pharma and focuses on finding a new way to treat acute and chronic pain with a drug that has no expectation for abuse and is not toxic to the liver, kidneys, or cardiovascular system. Hernan explains, "This is a tremendous unmet need in that there really has been no innovation in the pain space for over 50 years. Tylenol itself, acetaminophen, Tylenol was born in the '40s and the early '50s and worked by actually someone that was at the NIH that came to visit us a few times, a very well renowned neuroscientist. And he really discovered it incidentally, looking for another pathway, but we won't go into that. And that was adopted by McNeil Laboratories, and then eventually Johnson & Johnson." "And then, in the '60s and '70s, non-steroidals, non NSAIDs, were marketed as Advil and ibuprofen, and a bunch of NSAIDs were derived. And these are very good medicines for preventing inflammation and treating pain in the short term. The challenge with both of these classes of pain meds is that they have risks." "And then the third class, obviously, everybody knows about opioids and how they were marketed in the '90s." @SR_Pharma #Pain #AcutePain #Analgesic #Acetaminophen #Opioid #NSAID #Nontoxic #NonOpioid #NewOrleans southrampartpharma.com Download the transcript here

Sheila Frame is the President for the Americas at Amryt Pharma, founded on the belief that rare and ultra-rare diseases were an opportunity to support underserved patients differently than the big pharmaceutical companies could. With the acquisition of Mycapssa, Amryt is changing the treatment for the rare disease acromegaly from painful injections to the first and only twice-daily oral medication. Shelia explains, "We're currently commercially, at least, in three different areas. So lipodystrophy is a pretty significant leptin deficiency for people who suffer from that. It's a fairly rare disease, with about 300 patients roughly in the US. The second one is in homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia, and again, a very rare genetic disease, probably even fewer patients than what we see in lipodystrophy. And then the third area, of course, is acromegaly with Mycapssa, where we actually have products in the market." "I think what's interesting about not only the technology that we have with Mycapssa but also the impact of taking a pill twice a day means that you have this sustained control of the drug in your system. I think patients are finding that that really helps them. And so beyond just the convenience of not having to go through monthly objections, but also just the way they feel by having that sustained control and the drug in their system." @AmrytPharma #Amryt #Acromegaly #Endocrinology #RareDisease #Mycapssa Acromegalycommunity.org Amrytpharma.com Download the transcript here

Allison London Brown is the CEO of LUMINELLE, inventors of an advanced endoscopic system with a camera and biopsy device that allows physicians to perform gynecological procedures in their offices more safely, more efficiently, and with better reimbursement. Being able to look inside the uterus and bladder and perform operations that in the past would have required a hospital outpatient visit means that women and their doctors are more likely to identify problems sooner and get a prompt diagnosis of cancerous tissues. Allison elaborates, "If you have problems, it can also help with things like drug delivery for overactive bladder. And it can be used for fertility, both treatments, as well as trying to prevent pregnancy. So it's a pretty versatile system. It's very low cost, and it's really so that women can have procedures done in the comfort of their physician's office with less anesthesia and certainly less cost." "And for the payers, if you're catching things sooner, you're not incurring all these costs that you might in a hospital, like the anesthesiologist and all the nurses and all the different things that go along with the hospital outpatient procedure. It's much more beneficial for them as well. So it's really a nice move to try to get people care the first time at the first place they should be going." #LUMINELLE #Endoscopy #MedicalDevice #WomensHealth #UterineCancer LUMINELLE360.com Download the transcript here