Empowered Patient Podcast

JT Garwood, the CEO and Co-Founder of bttn, identified there was not a spot on the internet where healthcare providers could go and compare the price of their most frequently purchased products. The bttn mission is to build a system that allows for transparency through an online marketplace and digital platform. With excellent customer service, the platform allows each practitioner to save time and money when procuring key supplies, getting the quality they expect. When customers or suppliers work with bttn, the company digitizes multiple parts of the supply chain. JT elaborates, "On the healthcare distribution side, I see it as bifurcated between national distributors and local distributors. There has been great organization to this entire process for many years. Healthcare distribution has been going on pretty flawlessly for the last 80-plus years in the United States. Group Purchasing Organizations have dominated it for a very long time, and healthcare providers are getting the supplies that they need. It really comes back to this impact of lack of digital transformation. And since technology hasn't been at the forefront, the industry has suffered because of it. So, overall, lots of organization, but not a ton of focus on the technology side." "We talk a lot about these two key pillars of transparency and technology. I'll start with technology because you mentioned the fax machine. It really is still common practice in medical supply to fax in an order sheet or to need to call your sales rep to place any sort of order or track where your latest shipment is. That doesn't mean that tech isn't present; it just hasn't been the focus." @JTGarwood @bttnusa #MedicalSupplies #HealthcareSupplies #SupplyChain #MedicalSupplyChain #PricingTransparency bttnusa.com Download the transcript here

David Fontana is the Chief Business and Strategy Officer at Umoja Biopharma which is using a cocktail of their TumorTags to kill solid tumors. This in vivo technology has the potential to streamline the gene therapy process by driving down costs, simplifying logistics, and increasing accessibility. David explains, "With in vivo, we don't deal with cells per se. We deal with cells in the body. So I'll focus on what we do. We have a very proprietary technology called VivoVec, which is a delivery system to deliver RNA through lentiviral vector particles. Our secret sauce is the ability to surface engineer these VivoVec cells to make them more specific, it's called tropism, to drive them to certain cell types. We're focusing on the T-cells, but also to transduce this RNA message, so all we're delivering is the components of an RNA message to get transformed into the target T-cells of the human. We're basically taking those T-cells and making them better killer cells by implanting these payloads, as we're calling them, which would really enable the body to create these cells in vivo and not have to deliver any cells ex vivo." "That's where we have a couple of interesting approaches at Umoja. The first one is our technology called TumorTags. These are really specific tags that hit the tumors. They bind with the tumors, they get absorbed into tumors, and then represent themselves on the surface in the small molecules, so they last there quite a long time. What our in vivo technology allows us to do is to bind to those receptors and basically form the T-cell synapse, then thus kill the tumor. The nice thing we like about our tumor tech technologies is we can use one in vivo CAR, so one called the universal CAR, and that will bind with several TumorTags." @UmojaBiopharma #CARTCells #Cancer #Tumors #InVivo #GeneTherapy #CellTherapy #Immunotherapy #Breyanzi Umoja-biopharma.com Download the transcript here

James Mackay is the Founder, President, and CEO of Aristea Therapeutics, a San Diego-based company that is applying its insights on neutrophils to develop a treatment for a rare inflammatory skin condition known as palmoplantar pustulosis, PPP. Most of the people who get this disease are postmenopausal females, and 90%+ of the patients either are current cigarette smokers or have a history of cigarette smoking. James explains, "So neutrophils are cells that are part of the immune system. They sit in the bone marrow, and then when there's either an infection or an inflammatory response in the body, the neutrophils are attracted out of the bone marrow to the site of infection or inflammation. In inflammatory diseases, what you often see is extremely large numbers of neutrophils accumulating at the site of the inflammation, which obviously causes some challenges for the patients." "And in our particular case, we have a drug, it's called RIST4721, which is a CXCR2 antagonist which actually blocks the neutrophils moving from the bone marrow to the site of inflammation. And we believe that this is potentially a way to treat a whole range of serious inflammatory diseases." "So there's definitely a direct link to cigarette smoking. There's not much basic research been done on PPP, so the exact reason for that is not clear, but we believe, based on some of the research, that it's due to the nicotine receptor in the sweat ducts on the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet. And the sweat ducts on the hands and the feet are different structures from those elsewhere in the body, which is why this disease probably just affects the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet." @AristeaTx #PPP #PalmoplantarPustulosis #RareDisease #Inflammation #Neutrophils #SanDiego aristeatx.com Download the transcript here

Ryan Mooney is the Executive VP and General Manager of Burgess Source, the payment integrity business unit of HealthEdge. Ryan sheds light on the root causes that lead to waste and errors in the process of providing and paying for healthcare. He points out the need for better data management and clear lines of communication for all participants in the system, including patients, providers, and payers. Ryan says, "I spent 23-plus years working in strict payment integrity. That is a kind of gain share model and contingency where you go, and you identify issues, and you recover them, or you prevent them from happening. The outside vendor keeps a percentage of that recovery and so on. And that way of thinking goes directly to the way that your question was asked, which is, where's the most waste? And I spent over two decades thinking in that same way." "But another way of framing that question is, what is leading to all of these downstream issues? And in the current project with Burgess Source and HealthEdge, we're trying to take payment integrity, this whole world of knowledge, of the ways that things break and where there's waste and where there are broken things, and apply that intelligence to paying things correctly. This means getting down to the root cause and fixing those things so that there is no waste downstream or we're reducing waste downstream." @HealthEdge #PaymentIntegrity #DigitalTransformation healthedge.com Download the transcript here

Michael Schrader is CEO and Co-Founder of Vaxess Technologies, which is transforming vaccine delivery from needles and syringes to a skin patch delivery system. Their solution reduces the need to have mass vaccination sites, makes vaccines easier and cheaper to transport, and addresses the reluctance of patients to get a shot in the arm. Using the protein polymer from silk, Vaxess is making patches with tiny protrusions that pierce the skin and allow the large molecule vaccines into the skin. Michael explains, "I think what COVID really brought to the forefront and highlighted for all of us was that the needle and syringe has a lot of drawbacks. The first being that these COVID vaccines required refrigeration or freezing temperatures, which made storage very challenging. In order to get these vaccines to people, we actually had to ask them to congregate. So we came to mass vaccination sites, whether at hospitals or places like Gillette Stadium or Fenway park here in Boston. In the event of a pandemic outbreak, the last thing you want to do is ask folks to come together, but we had to do that because you needed a trained healthcare professional to administer the product." "So when we take this patch, and we apply it to the patient's skin, it just barely breaks the surface of the skin - enough to allow the vaccine or other biologic drug into the skin. Those protrusions actually dissolve as they're letting go of the vaccine into the skin. Again, very similar to what you see from a nicotine patch. And after five minutes of wearing the patch, you can pull it off and throw it in the trashcan." @Vaxess #Vaccines #Vaccinations #COVID #FluShot #NeedleandSyringe #VaccinePatch vaxess.com Download the transcript here

Gabriele Brambilla is the CEO and Executive VP of AliraHealth and is looking for ways to humanize healthcare and involve patients in the entire drug development continuum. They deliver services to drug developers, medical device developers, and digital health solution providers. Gabriele explains, "We call it democratization of life sciences research, the ability to use our technology to directly involve patients, in different phases of development of a drug or a device, in a very active partnership, not just a passive collection of data." "So AliraHealth provides a continuum of services that starts from the very early phases of development of a drug or a device. And a drug would be for us the CMC, which is chemistry manufacturing control. It would go then to regulatory, so we help our clients to interact with the FDA, or EMA for Europe, and then register the drugs. And we run clinical trials for our clients and market access. Also the ability to deliver value and effectiveness in front of payers so that they can actually reimburse for the drug and give access to patients to the drug." @AliraHealth #PatientCentric #DigitalHealth #DecentralizedClinicalTrials #Digitaltx #DrugDevelopment AliraHealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Matt Wilson is the Founder and CEO of uMEd, bringing together healthcare providers and researchers to reach out to patients to participate in clinical trials. Using health data, uMed facilitates targeting good candidates for trials and helps the care provider educate patients about the value of participating in one or multiple clinical trials. In a very repeatable and scalable environment, uMed can match patients to specific study opportunities based on standardized queries. Matt explains, "A lot of other organizations in the clinical study space that are looking at using health record data are using it in a very different way because they're generally focused on bringing together existing EMR data or claims data from lots of different healthcare providers and using that in of itself to identify trends and value for researchers. Whereas uMed is taking a different approach, saying, "Well, actually, their health record data is incredibly useful as a starting point to be able to identify potential study participants." "We essentially have a common data infrastructure that sits across our network of healthcare providers, that's bound to the U.K. and now the U.S. as well, which will shortly be coming online. What we do in that network is each of these providers essentially say, "Yes, we want to be part of the uMed network." That allows us to be able to bring the data from those health records and normalize them across all of the different providers we're working with." #uMed #PatientRecruitment #ClinicalTrials #MedicalResearch #ClinicalTrialRecruitment uMed.io Download the transcript here

Andrew Hall is the CEO of IMV Inc, which has developed a platform based on a lipid-in-oil technology that encapsulates the therapeutic. When injected subcutaneously, the drug remains in a specific location to reinvigorate the immune system to overcome the tumor surveillance that allows cancer to grow. Andrew explains, "There is a checkered history in oncology drug development that is known as vaccines in oncology. For the longest period of time, they were so exciting and, unfortunately, so disappointing in the way they performed clinically. We believe with the technology that we've created at IMV, that we can make vaccines in oncology cool again. We are creating an ability to educate the immune system in a prolonged way, in a way that may present a historical retraction of why things failed before, or maybe it wasn't the targets that made them fail. Maybe it was the way in which the targets were delivered in a meaningful way." "The initial clinical trials are around a lead product, maveropepimut-S. So the target there is Survivin. Survivin is a target that's been well understood in cancer biology for a long time because it is very typical for a lot of cancers. One of the challenges we have as a company is that we have a number of targets that we could go after in cancer, but we just don't have all of the money in the world. So the reason we've chosen the targets we have, and these are ovarian cancer, these are DBCL, so Diffuse Large B-cell lymphoma basically, and then bladder cancer and other solid cancer is, we know that these cancers are highly overexpressing the target of Survivin. And we know that Survivin, and it's kind of akin to its name, is required for the cancer cell to survive." @IMV_inc #Immunotherapies #Immunotherapeutics #Cancer #Oncology #LipidinOilTechnology #Survivin #Halifax #NovaScotia IMV-inc.com Download the transcript here

Clark Lagemann is the CEO of Avidon Health which is helping organizations support employees as they recover from the disruption of COVID and adjust to the reconfiguration of the workplace. While many people are leaving their jobs for more income, Avidon is finding that employees are also seeking resources to address substance abuse, stress, and pain. Clark explains, "The kinds of substances really expanded so significantly prior to COVID then post-COVID. Before COVID, we could talk about one in 10 adults who reported anxiety and depressive disorder. Since COVID and in 2020, that shot up to four in 10, so nearly 40% of American workers suffer from mental health issues." "So things that they're going to rely on to help them get through this, alcohol, a substance, pills. Opioids are very common, then you can go into more illicit drugs. So, the most common things that we see in the workplace that we're doing for large organizations are alcohol addiction and typically some sort of prescribed medications." "Substance use in the workplace causes absenteeism, lost productivity, and healthcare expenses. That's from the employer, so those are big expenses, soft and hard costs, but the employee is facing the same thing. They're missing out on work, and they have lifestyle side effects because they're now suffering and they're going through these challenges. So, the opportunity that we have really is to create awareness. We start talking about that personalization first, but then creating awareness, making sure employees know what's available to them, and doing it in a discrete setting." @AvidonHealth #DigitalHealthCoaching #SubstanceUseSupport #CorporateWellness #CorporateWellBeing #SubstanceAbuse #Addiction avidonhealth.com Download the transcript here

Matthew Robinson is the Senior Vice President of R&D at Immunome, which is leveraging the information in memory B cells to target antibody therapeutics to kill tumor cells. Matthew explains, "At Immunome, we believe that the antibodies that these B cells are making have an ability to see the different types of tumor antigens, or the specific epitopes on infectious disease. Our platform allows us to see that disease through the lens of the human B cell. We can interrogate what those antibodies are binding to, and we can use that information to help other patients." "Right now, we have a couple of programs ongoing that are either in the clinic or moving towards the clinic. We have a program in infectious disease and COVID that is currently in phase 1b trials. It's a three-antibody cocktail. Those were isolated from patients who made a very robust antibody response to the disease and fought it off very effectively. Each of those antibodies was selected because they have different mechanisms of action." "Our lead oncology program is against an under-studied or an under-recognized anti-inflammatory cytokine. It's a molecule that the immune system makes to essentially tell the rest of its other components to stop making an immune response. We isolated an antibody from a head-and-neck cancer patient that pointed us towards IL-38 as being a potential important target for head and neck cancer." @Immunome #COVID19 #ImmunoOncology #MemoryBCells #AntibodyTherapeutics #AntibodyDrugConjugates #AutoimmuneDiseases #InfectiousDiseases immunome.com Download the transcript here