Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Jessica Grossman is the CEO of an early stage biotech, IgGenix, the world leader in discovering and characterizing IgE antibodies which have been identified as the cause of allergies. With an initial focus on peanut allergy, IgGenix is developing a plan to use a subcutaneous injection to block specific allergic reactions immediately. Jessica explains, "At IgGenix, what we do is start with whole blood donations from allergic donors. And we take that blood and isolate out the single B cells that are making the IgE antibodies. We get those IgE antibodies, and we transform them into an IgG antibody that's actually protective. And I'll use again, peanut as an example. That's our lead program, which we're the furthest ahead. We have done some pre-clinical work, some animal studies, which look remarkably promising, and I'm excited about it. But what we envision our therapy looking like is an antibody therapeutic that would be given to an individual, and the antibody would immediately protect them from any accidental exposure." "So we isolate these very rare B cells that produce IgE antibodies, and they're about 0.05% of the circulating blood cells. Because the IgE antibodies are so rare, they're also extremely potent, meaning they have a very high affinity. And when you are allergic, they seek out the food that you're allergic to and cause this immediate reaction. What we're doing is taking those very potent IgE antibodies, converting them to IgG antibodies to act as blockers." #IgGenix #FoodAllergyResearch #AllergicDisease #BCells #AntibodyTherapeutics #AirborneAllergies #EnvironmentalAllergies #SustainableInnovation #WomenInSTEM #Biotech IgGenix.com Download the transcript here

Bret Scholtes is the President and CEO of Guardion Health Sciences and is in the business of bringing medical foods and dietary supplements to the market. Formulating products with ingredients with solid science behind them, Guardion is also focused on creating good-tasting products that people want to continue to use for good health. Bret explains, "So, for example, we have an omega-3 gel bite that we'd recently formulated and started selling. There are a tremendous number of studies that are done on omega-3s. We put it in a format that's a little bit different than a soft gel. We'll be doing clinical work to basically prove the efficacy of not only omega-3 but also, what it looks like in that gel bite format, and how that would compare to other options that a consumer would have." "We think that there's the opportunity to look at the role that calcium plays in order for a person to benefit, from a bone perspective. We think that omega-3s are an excellent opportunity for someone to get essential nutrients that their body doesn't produce, which are proven for cognitive health and bone health. So for us, it's about living a more vibrant and active life, which is why we sell our products. And for us, it's about allowing the body to get the nutrients that it needs in sufficient form to continue to live that life as long as possible." @GuardionHealth #MedicalFood #ClinicalNutrition #Omega3 #Nutrition guardionhealth.com Download the transcript here

Robbie Hughes is the Founder and CEO of Lumeon, which is deploying its care orchestration platform to personalize the treatment plan and follow-up for patients while guiding care providers to make the right decision at the right time. Robbie elaborates, "We decided that there was a need for a solution that would proactively coordinate care algorithmically and do so at a very low cost. Thus, you could use that system to coordinate care everywhere. What we see now from our providers and our partners is that they use it to coordinate everything from elective surgery to discharge planning to hospital-at-home and everything in between." "I need to do all of this in real-time. What we are doing is we're combining all of these things together into a single solution, and it really allows us to do something transformative in terms of the personalized scaling of care. It's tasking the care team specifically with activities, and it's automating those, and that's engaging the patient and making them an equal participant in that care. What's critical is that this isn't just patient engagement. We're not just sending notifications out to patients saying, do this or that. It's actually using the patient engagement loop as a way of understanding what's working and what's not and then guiding the care team appropriately." @Lumeon_ #CareOrchestration #CareAutomation #QualityImprovement #DigitalTransformation #Burnout #Productivity #ClosingCareGaps lumeon.com Download the transcript here

James Hammer, the Senior VP at Harmony Healthcare IT and Dr. Colin Banas, the Chief Medical Officer at DrFirst join me to discuss their recent partnership to accelerate the transition of care providers and payers to a digital environment. Faced with clinician burnout, organizations are even more pressed to find efficient methods to treat patients and reduce the need to struggle with outdated information systems and data silos. Jim explains, "The farther back or historical, the older legacy applications are, the less the data is actually what's called discreet or codified. And today's EHRs, obviously require codified data to alert triggers and have to be codified to be able to interact and be interoperable with other systems. What's exciting about this relationship between DrFirst and us is they've got years of technology and the ability to look at medications, for example. And, to take literally descriptive text and convert that into codified data, meaning translate that to an NDC code, or a drug name, as well as a CIG that's required for interoperable and usable data in the EHR." Colin elaborates, "Anytime you have the clinical team re-input data, it's tedious, but it also can introduce errors. I've been in informatics for over two decades now, and we've been talking about interoperability since the onset. I do think we've gotten a lot better, especially with solutions like Harmony's, but I still think that we have a way to go. Particularly, I would refer to semantic interoperability, which is what Jim was referring to. This is when the data not only moves from point A to B, but it arrives at endpoint B in the format that system is expecting and can be used immediately without that manual intervention that is so tedious." @DrFirst #Healthit #Interoperability #ValueBasedCare #EHR #ClinicianBurnout #PatientOutcomes drfirst.com harmonyhit.com Download the transcript here

Rajatesh Gudibande is the Co-Founder and President of GraphWear Technologies, which has taken lessons from earlier self-monitoring blood glucose device development to come up with a patient-friendly system for continuous monitoring of glucose in people with diabetes. Using a needle-free device, this smart device is attached on the wrist, on the lower abdomen, or on the side arm. Raj explains, "The principle of operation is fairly simple and also unique, in a way. Let's look at what is our source first. Skin is the largest organ in the human body, and it has access to interstitial fluid, which is the fluid just underneath the skin and a few layers off it, so underneath the stratum corneum. And so, if we are able to somehow put a device that can taste molecules by pulling them out a little bit just on the surface of the skin, then we can access whatever's there in the blood." "But that requires a device that's very sensitive. So the first key principle operation is we have a sensitive material that is electronically active. It is specific to the molecules we are targeting, and then it converts the molecular information into electric signals and then transmits via Bluetooth to your phone. Think about it, it's literally an electronic tongue tasting molecules like glucose that come out. The key is the sensor sits on the surface of the skin, so there's no breaking of the skin whatsoever. Still, then there's a peripheral device that converts, stores, computes, and has the battery in it, and that then is a housing for which the device operates together as a system." @GraphWear_Tech #GraphWearTechnologies #NotBlood #NeedleFree #Detection #Nanomaterial graphwear.co Download the transcript here

Jeff Beck is the Chief Development Officer at BioCareSD, a specialty pharmaceutical distributor. The field of specialty drugs has grown from the first drug for hemophilia in the 1980s to today, with about 50% of the drugs in the pipeline being specialty drugs. BioCareSD is an important component of the supply chain to ensure that these life-saving and life-sustaining drugs are available at the right time and in the right place. Jeff explains, "I'm actually right now at the World Orphan Drug Conference, and it's unbelievable the number of studies that are underway for diseases that maybe a hundred people have, or a thousand people. What we're seeing now is more, and more of these patients are being able to live a really great life, no longer worried about having debilitating conditions. Sometimes, it's life-saving medicine. Sometimes, life-sustaining medicines. At BioCareSD, we're an important cog in the wheel to get those products to the patients." "Specialty pharmaceuticals, it seems like the term has expanded a lot over the days. Sometimes you used to think that specialty pharmaceuticals were just infusible drugs, really high-cost drugs. There are specialty pharmaceuticals now that are pills, but they're unique. They're drugs that usually treat smaller patient populations, so I don't see them moving out of that niche or that term, so to speak." @BioCareSD #BioCareSD #BioCare #SpecialtyDistribution #MedicalSupplyChain #RareDiseases #Pharmaceuticals BioCareSD.com Download the transcript here

Marty Gauvin is the CEO and Co-Founder of Fertilis, an Australian-based company creating micro medical tools to be used in cell culture such as IVF to improve outcomes. There is a vast difference in outcomes of IVF across different clinics in part because of the human intervention that is required in the cell development process. Fertilis has developed a system that controls the environment around each cell and mimics what would happen in the body. Marty explains, "The first way it makes it cheaper is simply by having one less cycle. Patients are not paying for a baby. Patients are paying for a cycle. And so if it takes one less cycle, the average at the moment is three cycles, if you could have a baby in two cycles, that's a very major saving. A saving well into the five figures that you're going to make in any marketing in the world." "It further makes it efficient because, at the moment, IVF is so expensive because it's what the economist would call supply constraints. There aren't enough embryologists and IVF clinics for the number of people that would like to become parents. And so, by making the process more automated, we can make it so that the best embryologists are not required for every single cycle. We can make it possible for an embryologist to be trained in much less time, for example. So the constraint that's on that capacity can then be removed." #Fertilis #IVF #IVFClinic #CellCulture #Embryologists #IncubatorMakers fertil.is Download the transcript here

Jenny Ahlstrom is the Founder and CEO of the HealthTree Fouon and a multiple myeloma patient and patient advocate. The HealthTree Foundation was the winner of the GSK Target the Future Think Tank Challenge and will receive financial support and technical expertise to extend equal access and diversity in multiple myeloma research, clinical trials, services, and education. This effort includes patient navigators who are members of the Black community as well as Spanish speakers who can provide patients access to material translated into Spanish. Jenny explains, "I was diagnosed in 2010 and had some hypotheses about what I wanted in terms of my own therapy and my own types of support that I was looking for. And so, in 2012, we started the foundation, and we have been building up different patient programs for multiple myeloma over that long period of time. We've just gone to look and see what is available already in terms of support services. Then we identified different gaps that we saw as patients ourselves and tried to fill those gaps. And that's been the primary effort of our work, to fill those gaps for patients." "So, we are going to apply this funding to our equity and diversity program. And specifically on this blackmyelomahealth.org website. This website will do outreach to the African American community. Like I said, they are two or three times more likely to develop multiple myeloma. And it's really essential that they learn broadly about what multiple myeloma is." @HealthTree #HealthTreeFoundation #GSK #TargettheFuture #MultipleMyeloma #PatientAdvocate healthtree.org Download the transcript here ************ Interview with Dr. Tania Small GSK Podcast and Transcript

Dr. Tania Small is the Vice President and Head of Global Oncology Medical Affairs and Chair, R&D Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Counsel at GSK. To improve clinical participation and outreach to a more diverse multiple myeloma community, GSK created the Target the Future Think Tank Challenge to find partners to meet unmet needs. Tania explains, "This is where this whole Target the Future program stems from. It was really understanding what the needs are in the multiple myeloma community so that we get an earlier diagnosis so that we get improved access so that we get improved outcomes. What we did at GSK is we asked those questions. Then we paused and said actually the people who are best equipped to tell us is, are the patients themselves and their caregivers. And so, our goal was to take a grassroots approach to really understanding what are the key needs in this community to have the optimal outcome." "So, we launched something called Target the Future to your point, this think tank for anyone in the community who could come up with innovative and impactful solutions to address these problems. We wanted them to let us know, and what we decided to do was fund their idea, not only fund the idea but give help to implement this idea." "Yes, and we were extremely impressed with all three of our finalists. But this one really checked all the boxes and what they pitched was a HealthTree Equity and Diversity program. When you go through it, it really shows me an optimal model because not only did they check all of the boxes, but they were creating a real, sustainable solution within the communities that they were trying to strengthen and trying to help." @GSK #TargettheFuture #MultipleMyeloma #HealthTreeFoundation gsk.com Download the transcript here *************************** Interview with HealthTree Foundation Podcast and Transcript

Joe Landolina is the CEO and Co-Founder of Cresilon, the only fill-and-finish operation in the five boroughs of New York. Building on a discovery about the ability to stop all kinds of bleeding, Cresilon is using recycled algae, meaning algae or kelp that has washed up onto the shoreline. The vendors they work with are highly sustainable as they are not damaging kelp forests but salvaging material that has already washed up on beaches. Joe explains, "So I was very experienced in plant-based chemistries, and one day I was trying to run an experiment. The original intent of the experiment failed, but what I came across was this blend of two polysaccharides, long chains of sugar, that formed a gel that would immediately reassemble and stick to tissue, like skin or an open injury. It wouldn't let go until you wanted it to." "That's not quite what we do today, but that led to the technology that we now have commercially under the brand name VETIGEL, which is a hemostatic gel that immediately stops anything from the most traumatic of bleeding, like gunshot wounds, arterial bleeds, all the way down to small nicks and scrapes surgically, on contact, without the need to apply pressure, allowing the patient to produce their own healthy clot and heal the wound normally." @Cresilon #Cresilon #StoptheBleed #BleedingControl #Vertigel #Hemostatic #PlantBasedChemistries cresilon.com Download the transcript here