Empowered Patient Podcast

Matt Murphy is the EVP of Network and Clinical Content at Cohere Health, innovators in utilization management and prior authorization for tests, services, and drugs. By taking a patient-first approach means reviewing cases on behalf of the Cohere health plan clients as well as with an eye to the health outcomes of patients. Matt explains," Utilization management really evolved as an adversarial exercise with health plans pitted against physicians. And if you think about the key areas where it's impacting patients and physicians more broadly, really it's three things. First is delays in care and access. Really there shouldn't be anything coming in between a patient and the care they need as long as it's clinically appropriate. So I'd say that's probably the first issue." "A few weeks ago, we reported out jointly with Humana, one of our first clients, on the impact we had in year one, and it was tremendous in terms of medical expense savings. But I think it goes back to the philosophical differences people have in utilization management." "On one side, you have a number of folks who think that the only way to drive down medical expense is to deny services versus our vision, which is if you truly are driving the right clinical care for patients and the highest value care, you're inherently going to have lower expense. So I think if you can kind of transition across that philosophical boundary into the focus on clinical outcomes, you inherently save money." @CohereHealth #PriorAuthorization #UtilizationManagement coherehealth.com Download the transcript here

Steven Goh is the CEO of Achiko which is developing a COVID-19 test based around using a DNA aptamer, a small strand of oligonucleotides, as an alternative to using an antigen. When saliva is placed in a colloidal solution and read by a spectrophotometer, smart software can then classify if the person is likely to be COVID positive or negative. Steven elaborates, "The sum of it all is that we believe that we've got possibly one of the tests with the best value for the money. It looks like the cost per test at scale may only be tens of cents. The sensitivity at very low viral loads... And the customer experience is great. It starts with a minty mouthwash and spit in a tube and scan on a spectrophotometer, and hopefully, in a year with the generation three or four product, it'll end up being scanned on your phone." "In the future, given the advantages that using aptamers give us, yes, we are looking at a polymorphic set of tests where we could actually be able to identify the full range of respiratory diseases and give you a classification. So, one test we'll be able to, in about a year from now, we hope we'll be able to tell if you've got bronchitis, pneumonia, tuberculosis, SARS, MERS, which variant of COVID. We believe that's technically possible, given the technology stack that we're using." @achikoag #Achiko #COVID19 #COVID19Tests #COVID #Aptamex Achiko.com Download the transcript here

Angie Franks is the CEO of ABOUT, an innovative healthcare technology company, formally known as Central Logic. ABOUT is solving the problem of getting acute patients to the optimal setting of care as they move into and out of the hospital and then to a post-acute facility or their own home.  Angie explains, "Well, a big contributor to physician burnout is really all of the work. I would call it almost unnecessary friction and noise in their day-to-day jobs. So if we take a use case that ABOUT solves every day for health systems across the country, it is addressing the problem of interfacility patient transfers." "When our solution is not in place, the noise and the friction on the clinical staff at the accepting location is tremendous."  "All of this noise to get the decision made is just extra work sitting on clinicians' plates that can be handled in a centralized hub, a support service hub on behalf of the health system. We can take all of that work and all of that noise so that the clinicians inside the hospital system can focus on taking care of the patients under their charge while the access center, which operates as a centralized hub and shared service center for the entire health system, can take all of those calls." "Well, much of this process operates like the 1960s with sticky notes, whiteboards, post-it notes, phone calls, nurses writing information on their hands, and making a lot of calls." @About_est2005 #Hospitals #InterfacilityPatientTransfer abouthealthcare.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Dolca Thomas is the Executive VP of Research and Development and Chief Medical Officer at Equillium, targeting autoimmune diseases where patients do not have a medicine that can lead to complete remission. In development, is the drug itolizumab considered a first-in-class, that focuses on the specific target and impacts what is known in the immune response as costimulation. Dolca elaborates, "Right now, at Equillium, we're focusing on three difficult to treat autoimmune diseases. The first is graft-versus-host disease. This is a condition that develops in patients after they've had a bone marrow transplant where the donor cells that are used to treat the malignancy, the cancer that the patient has, then, later on, starts to attack the cells that belong to the patient. This is a disease that can occur anytime from immediately after transplant up to 100 days post-transplant" "The second area where we're focused on is related to autoimmune disorders and diseases is lupus nephritis. Lupus nephritis is a disease that typically impacts women, young women, and women of color." "The third area of focus for us as it relates to difficult to treat autoimmune diseases is asthma. There's still a need for other new therapies to help the 60% of patients that aren't positively impacted as it relates to their asthmatic control." @EquilliumBio #Equillium #AutoimmuneDiseases #AutoimmuneDisorders #Nephritis #aGVHD #GraftversusHostDisease #Itolizumab #LupusNephritis #CD6ALCAM #RareDisease #SanDiego equilliumbio.com Download the transcript here

Tom Lemberg is the Founder and CEO of Curebase and was recently included in the Forbes 30 under 30 list for 2022 for leading positive global change in healthcare. Curebase is shaking up the world of clinical trials by providing software for patients making it easy for them to participate from home, software for doctors that makes it easy for them to participate in the research, along with a virtual research site model that has grown even more valuable due to the pandemic. Tom explains, "In terms of what Curebase does, we're a full platform for what's called a decentralized clinical trial. So, that means taking trials out of the elite institutions and bringing them to patients at home. We have an app for patients which guides them through things like discovering trials, submitting data at home, connecting medical records, scheduling telemedicine appointments, conducting telemedicine appointments, and participating in treatments from home." "We also have software for physicians. So we've brought over 100 community physicians, so sort of first-time researchers, into the clinical trial world using our software to make it easy for them to participate." "Through the software and our virtual site model, we've really reduced the barriers to participation for patients and doctors, and that's what gets us into the idea of Bring Your Own Physician. So, Bring Your Own Physician is something that we're really pioneering. It's the idea that a patient could discover a clinical trial on the internet, sign up at home using our app or any other technology, and they could then participate with their own doctor." @CurebaseDCT #DCT #DecentralizedDigitalTrials #ClinicalResearch #ClinicalTrials #BYOP #DigitalTherapeutics #DigitalHealth #Telemedicine Curebase.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Joseph O'Donnell is the Chief Medical Officer at Phosplatin Therapeutics founded to develop a drug with platinum in it to kill cancer cells. Phosplatin is in clinical trials with PT-112 which is the first cancer therapy molecule that has a pyrophosphate on it and works by harnessing the immune system and causing immunogenic cell death. Dr. Joe explains, "This drug is in this space that's really burgeoning called immuno-oncology, where we're using immune agents to stimulate the immune system to actually affect the cancer, to actually knock down the cancer. And this is one that has a different mechanism than some of the other agents and lots of potential to be used in combination to produce synergy with those other agents in this very exciting space." "So, the checkpoint inhibitors are one group of drugs that seems to be interesting to combine with PT-112, and I suspect we'll see more of that in the future. But just PT-112 by itself, it has this effect called producing immunogenic cell death. That's a way in which a drug causes cancer cells to die by activating the immune system, the adaptive immune system, to actually attack the tumor and actually devour it. And so that's one of the properties that the PT-112 has." @Phosplatin #Oncology #ImmunoOncology #Cancer #CancerTherapeutics #ICD #ImmunogenicCellDeath #Chemotherapy #CheckPointInhibitors #Innovation #NYBiotech Phosplatin.com Download the transcript here

Alain Moussy is the Co-Founder and CEO of AB Science a clinical-stage company designing and developing novel drugs to address diseases with high unmet medical needs. Masitinib, their drug in development is being investigated in neurological diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer's, and multiple sclerosis as well for severe forms of COVID-19 and as an antiviral anti-protease in ambulatory COVID-19 patients. Alain explains, "We have started two such studies in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) disease, which is well known across the world, and another one in a rare disease called Mastocytosis, and those two studies are up and running. We have also started a phase 2 in COVID with masitinib after the University of Chicago discovered that masitinib is actually a potent antiviral against the virus, which was actually a surprise for us. Now that we have this data, we are developing masitinib for COVID as an antiviral. And you know, Karen, we need an antiviral along with the vaccine to fight this pandemic." "The development of masitinib in Covid was not anticipated because our drug was not designed to be an antiviral. It's just that the structure of the protease of the virus has a strong affinity with the structure of our compound by chance. The co-crystallizations of the protease of the virus with masitinib, which has been done by the University of Chicago, show that they match." #ABScience #COVID19 #Masitinib #AntiviralDrug #ALS #Alzheimers #MS AB-Science.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Abigail Hirsch is the Co-Founder of Lin Health which is bringing innovative chronic pain treatments to a broader audience thanks to their digital behavioral health platform. Lin Health members get specifically designed pain management plans and virtual access for support from a deep team of medical experts. Abigail explains, "Then, let's get to the treatments that work for chronic pain. There's a seminal study that came out in JAMA this past fall, looking at a treatment called PRT, pain reprocessing therapy. There are some other papers with similar findings for similar therapies, but these are behavioral health techniques that were designed specifically to help turn down the pain processing system." "There are very specific techniques that may look a little bit like some other things in behavioral health, a little bit like a cognitive-behavioral approach, a little bit like a mindfulness approach. Still, they actually are quite different because they were designed specifically to help the pain processing pathways learn to settle down the degree to which they're signaling pain, and they're incredibly effective." #LinHealth #ChronicPain #PainProcessing #DigitalHealth #Telehealth #Telemedicine Lin.Health Download the transcript here

Dr. Hing Wong is the Founder and CEO of HCW Biologics and a pioneer in the field of inflammaging which recognizes that as we age, chronic inflammation can trigger a range of age-related diseases. Their proprietary platform TOBI is using a unique Tissue FactOr-Based Scaffold to build multifunctional fusion molecules to put a variety of immunotherapeutic molecules together in a drug using subcutaneous injection.  Hing explains, "There is a lot of really strong scientific evidence demonstrating that when we get old, we basically accumulate chronic inflammation. This chronic inflammation with aging basically makes up the word inflammaging. What it does is the accumulation of chronic inflammation and is the cause of a lot of major diseases in humans, such as cancer, neurodegenerative disease, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease also diabetes. So our mission is to try to find drugs, immunotherapeutic in particular, to disrupt this inflammaging in a sense to disrupt the chronic inflammation accumulation during the aging process." "Our idea is to get rid of these chronic inflammation sources induced by chemotherapy. So, on the one hand, you can enhance the chemotherapy's efficacy against cancer and also can completely eliminate the side effects caused by the chemotherapy. So that's another reason we chose cancer being our first indication." #HCW #Inflammaging #Aging #Longevity #HealthSpan #LifeSpan HCWbiologics.com Download the transcript here

Joško Bobanović is a Partner, Industrial Biotechnology funds at Sofinnova Partners, a leading European venture capital firm in the life sciences. The focus of this group is finding companies that are applying the mature tools that were initially developed for healthcare into industrial disciplines, specifically, applications in food, chemicals, agriculture, and materials. Joško explains, "In the 20 years from then to now, we have shaved multiple zeros from the cost of sequencing. That's equally true for other areas of biotechnology. That shift has allowed us to open up the application from what we tend to call red biotech, red coming from the blood, in terms of healthcare, to other angles of biotech." "They often come in color-coded. You have the white biotech, green biotech, and blue biotech. The white one is industrial applications or products that are produced in the chemical industry. Then you have the green biotech, which focuses on and deals with plants. Then you have the blue biotech, which is oriented towards the ocean and typically focuses on algae and similar things. That's kind of how we look at biotech opportunities beyond just healthcare." @SofinnovaVC #SofinnovaPartners #IndustrialBiotechnology #IndustrialBiotech #DNAScript #Sustainability #Environmentalimpact sofinnovapartners.com Download the transcript here