Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Jim Feng is the CEO and Founder of Phyxable which is serving up curated content specific to an injury or chronic condition to help patients overcome physical pain.  Using a virtual approach, Phyxable is engaging patients with gamification and social media type notifications to keep people on a plan and encourage them to not drop off. Jim elaborates, "We actually combine it with some machine learning algorithms to personalize the solution for you. And along the way, we also found that good guidance and coaching still play a good part in recovery, so we provide that service as well." "And the last point, we're actually building on the high technology side in the augmented reality part. So, there's one side to understanding where you're at and what you need to do. But the other aspect of it is checking in to make sure you're actually doing it right on a daily basis. We're utilizing augmented reality technology just on your phone camera in order to provide the feedback in real-time." @Phyxable #Health #Pain #Telehealth #Physiotherapy #Chiropractic #PhysicalTherapy #OnlineCoaching #OnlineCoach #OnlineTherapy #Entrepreneur Phyxable.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Ketan Patel is the Chief Medical Officer at SyTrue which has taken on the challenge of modernizing the exchange of information between providers and insurance companies. Transitioning from a traditional system designed for reactive healthcare to one of preventative care means information flow and analysis need to change as well.   Ketan explains, "As we start thinking about healthcare in the next few decades, it's really about receiving value back from the money we see spent. It's about getting involved earlier, looking at those risk factors at a really early stage when the intervention can cost a 10th or a 20th of what it might cost later in life. And that's a paradigm shift, and our systems aren't really created for that. They were never designed for that kind of thinking. And we now realize this is important, and we have to do this. This is where there's a need for technology to get to that information, but there's also a need to look at that information differently." "So, structured data, I'll start with that one, is information that is very succinct, it's defined. It's like a measurement coming off of a machine. It's easy to put that piece of information or data into a field inside of a computer or in a database. "Unstructured information is things like a narrative note, a consultation report from a specialist that a patient goes and sees, and at the end of it, could be a five or six-page note. And there's a lot of words, a lot of phrases, a lot of paragraphs. Intermixed inside of that could also be other types of information like lab information, imaging report information, or a genetic study, for example." @SyTrue #SyTrue #UnstructuredData #NLP #NaturalLanguageProcessing #COVID #DigitalHealth #MedTech #ElectronicHealthRecords sytrue.com Download the transcript here  

Dr. Josh Liu is the CEO and Co-Founder of SeamlessMD is working with care providers to safely discharge patients home sooner by at-home monitoring to track progress and reduce readmission rates. This allows hospitals to free up beds so they can actually see more patients, get more surgeries and other inpatient care done sooner. Josh elaborates, "Where SeamlessMD is differentiated from other patient engagement solutions is that we think of ourselves as more of a digital care journey platform. So the idea is that we work with hospitals and health systems to engage, monitor, and stay connected with patients across this entire healthcare journey when you're going through something like a surgery, a cancer journey, or chronic care journey." "The funny thing is when we first started SeamlessMD about nine years ago, just by chance, we focused initially on the older, higher risk, the complex patient population in their sixties, seventies, or eighties. So from day one, we had chosen to design this for the most challenged population when it comes to technology. Because of that, it's now very easy for all populations to use. And so we see all ages from the early twenties all the way up to the nineties." @SeamlessMD #SeamlessMD #PatientEngagement #DigitalHealth #HealthTech seamless.md Download the transcript here

Dr. Brian Roberts is a Senior VP and Head of Clinical Development at Rezolute which is developing first in class therapies in the treatment of metabolic diseases. In addition to working on a therapeutic for congenital hyperinsulinism, a rare disease, Rezolute is also in clinical trials with RZ402, an oral small molecule to treat diabetic macular edema which is showing an increase in prevalence due to the increase in the number of people suffering from diabetes. Brian explains, "DME or diabetic macular edema is a complication of diabetes. It's a subset of diabetic retinopathy. And like other complications of diabetes, the blood vessels in the eye become injured or corrupted. And this leads to inflammation in the leakage of fluid across the blood vessel into the eye. And in this case, into the macula of the retina, which is responsible for high-resolution vision. If that continues, it can result in progressive visual loss and even blindness." "Another problem with these therapies is that in some patients, they simply don't work. So the disease is not driven by vascular endothelial growth factor or VEGF. And so there really is a need for therapies that address a different mechanism and that allow the earlier treatment of disease before the disease gets difficult to control. And that's where our oral therapeutic with a different mechanism of action comes into play." "First and foremost, it represents a different mechanism, or a different way, to target the disease. RZ402 is a plasma kallikrein inhibitor. The kallikrein system is involved in the promotion of inflammation and vascular leakage. And it's part of normal physiology around the body to really promote the fight against infection or injury." @RezoluteBio #RezoluteBio #Biotech #DME #Medicines #Innovation #RareDisease #MetabolicDiseases #DiabeticMacularEdema #DiabeticRetinopathy RezoluteBio.com Download the transcript here

Paul Cataford is the Interim CEO and President of Titan Medical Inc. which is bringing advancements to single-port or single incision robotic-assisted surgery. This differs from multiple ports where a number of incisions are made, and different tools are inserted into the different ports. Titan is moving all of the tools like the camera, a needle driver, grasper, and shearers through a single access point thanks to innovations in robotics, miniaturization, computing power, and visualization techniques. Paul elaborates, "Well, as you can well imagine, what multiport means, you have multiple incisions around the abdomen or around the surgical work area. Every time you create a new point of entry, you create a new opportunity for infection. So, you have a new wound that needs to heal. You have a new scar, there's further risk of hitting something without intention, as you have multiple incisions. Less sites mean less pain, so a single incision has big benefits to the patient." "So the patient is the real beneficiary of single incision. It's, as I mentioned earlier, faster healing, fewer pain meds, your hospital stay is a lot shorter. The reason why the surgeons like it is it can be quite tiring to do multiple surgeries stacked back-to-back-to-back. Whereas with robotic-assisted surgery, they don't fatigue as quickly. They're not bending over a patient. The fine motor skills that are required with these surgeons, it's not as tiring when you're working with tools and hand controllers and foot pedals." @Titan_Medical #RoboticSurgery #Robotics #Gynecology #MinimallyInvasiveSurgery #Hysterectomy titanmedicalinc.com Download the transcript here

Sheetal Parmar is the Head of Clinical Services at Natera, a clinical genetic testing company. She draws on her experience as a prenatal genetic counselor to address the need for more accurate and available non-invasive prenatal genetic testing.  This kind of information can guide women and their care teams and can also help emotionally prepare families. Sheetal looks forward to seeing more genetic markers being used to identify other types of pregnancy health. Sheetal explains, "People want to know, what are all the different options of testing? You can want to know as little information as possible or no information, all the way to "I want all the testing that could possibly be available for me or for the pregnancy." I think those are the type of questions that come up. Or "I have this in my family history. Will this test help me with that?" We want to make sure the right test is ordered based on the information that's needed for that patient based on their values and their beliefs, and what they want to know." "There has been a significant drop in the number of invasive tests that are done. I recall when I was first starting in practice, I worked with an OB geneticist, and we would do like seven of these a day. Now it might be seven a week, maybe less than that in his practice. It's pretty rare because of the screening tests that are available now, non-invasive prenatal testing is such an accurate screening test compared to what was previously available that there are much fewer false positives and false negatives. Much fewer women are pulled out as a high risk that would then need to be offered to be tested." #Natera #NIPT #NonInvasivePrenatalTesting #GeneticCounselor #GeneticTesting #GeneticScreening #PrenatalCare Natera.com Download the transcript here

Dr. David Dyer is the Chief Retina Specialist for Alimera Sciences, a publicly-traded company specializing in the development and commercialization of prescription ophthalmology treatments for the management of retinal diseases. Having high blood sugar over time can damage the retinal blood vessels that bring nutrients to the retina, creating diabetic retinopathy. Alimera has developed a delivery platform to inject their drug Iluvien into the eye to treat the resulting diabetic macular edema. David explains, "So with retinal diseases, you're usually talking about diseases within the nerve fiber layer of the retina, the retinal vessels, or in the tissue that is underneath the retina that supports some of the retinal function. And that includes diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, vein occlusions, sometimes you can get detachments of the retina, and there are many other disorders, but those are the most common." "The treatment for diabetic macular edema typically involves injecting medications into the eye. That sounds horrible, but we can actually numb up the eye, usually, with a series of numbing drops, and with a very tiny needle, we can inject medicine into the center of the eye, and that medicine diffuses into the retina." "Iluvien is a sustained-release steroid. It's a little pellet, like a little tiny piece of rice, and we can inject that into the eye in the office, and it slowly dissolves over a period of three years, and it releases a steroid into the eye. The steroid works specifically on diabetic macular edema or the swelling in the central vision, and it decreases swelling." @AlimeraSciences $ALIM #Iluvien #NewDayStudy #DMEandME #DiabeticMacularEdema #Ophthamology #Diabetes #Vision AlimeraSciences.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Justin Norden is a Partner at GSR Ventures, a healthcare technology-focused venture fund investing in early-stage companies that are leveraging emerging technology to drive transformative changes in healthcare for all patients.   Justin explains, "Digital health has been, I think, a long journey for companies really trying to find things that we know should work, that we've seen work in other aspects of business where technologies really transformed how we do things. Even though that technology has been possible, it really hasn't touched healthcare until many would argue, very recently." "Many companies that came in, either starting around 2010 or even through 2015, were a lot of the similar ideas that we're seeing today, there just wasn't the adoption. We didn't see patients being ready to adopt these technologies. Largely, even though some patients tried to adopt them, the providers weren't ready, providers weren't ready to deal with that data or willing to connect or spend time with the patients using these new technologies." "In terms of how my background fits into how I look at companies today, I think one of the things that's very clear is if you go through medical training with a computer science background, you're continually banging your head against the wall saying why are we doing this repeatable task? Why are we using fax machines?" #GSRVentures #DigitalHealth #MobileHealth #HealthTech #Healthcare #VirtualHealthcare #VentureCapital #HealthTechDeals GSRVenturesus.com Download the transcript here Download the transcript here

Micha Breakstone is the CEO and Co-Founder of NeuraLight and points out the lack of objective and sensitive evaluation measures available to diagnose neurological diseases like multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's.  Currently, evaluations using short questionnaires, visual observations, and self-reported behavior are further influenced by biases of the physician. NeuraLight is developing an approach that focuses on using images of the eye to produce objective, repeatable measures of disease progression. Micha elaborates, "We look at over 100 parameters at once, and we capture these by standard videos or anything from a webcam to a mobile phone. And we've developed a quite unique technology that marries, on the one hand, a kind of standard machine learning. But on the other hand, something that is entirely unique to us which is signal processing. So the ability to basically bring technologies that are available for satellites, in super-resolution, bring them down to earth into mobile phones in order to take these standard videos and extract parameters at a super-resolution or a sub-pixel resolution from standard video." "There are actually over 700 papers that were published in the last 20 years or so showing that oculometrics, namely, micro measurements of the eyes, are extremely good as a proxy both for currently used endpoints like UPDRS and EDSS that I mentioned earlier. But also in phenotyping patients, looking at the difference between secondary progressive MS and repeating, remitting MS or the subtypes, four or five subtypes of Alzheimer's, just being able to look at those oculometrics or ocular measures, being able to identify the subtype of the disease is a great proxy for the standard scale." @NeuraLight #NeuraLight #AI #Oculometric #OcularMeasures #NeurologicalDiseases #NeurodegenerativeDisease #Parkinsons #MS #MultipleSclerosis #Alzheimers #Dementia #ClinicalTrials #NeurologicalEvaluation NeuraLight.ai Download the transcript here

Jesús Martin-Garcia is the CEO of GeNeuro, a Swiss-based clinical stage company focused on novel approaches for treating autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases.  While previously considered junk DNA, human endogenous retroviruses are now being seen in a new light as they represent 8% of human DNA and play a role in locking viral reproduction. Jesús explains, "Our mission is really to focus on and to defeat neurodegenerative diseases. We have an original approach, and we believe because we are based on leveraging the biology of human endogenous retroviruses, which are the traces that are left in our DNA by the virus contaminations that affected our ancestors. We believe they play a major role in neurodegenerative diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, ALS, and now recent data has shown, long-COVID." "Yes, that was frankly a surprise for us. It was a discovery led by some academic groups in the US and Europe that showed that SARS-CoV-2, remember I told you at the beginning, this interaction between exogenous viruses in our cells, and the fact that some of them were able to de-repress pathogenic proteins. SARS-CoV-2 was shown to be able to de-repress W-ENV, which is basically the same protein that we see in the brain of MS patients. But this time, it was really, I would say a more diverse de-repression - a stronger expression in lymphocytes in the blood, on endothelial cells of the brain, the heart, and the lung, and also all the way up to microglia, the brain, in some patients that had died from COVID." @GeneuroO #Geneuro #Temelimab #HERVs #LongCOVID #ALS #MS #MultipleSclerosis #NIH #Retroviruses Geneuro.com Download the transcript here