Empowered Patient Podcast

Tzvia Bader is the CEO and Co-Founder of TrialJectory which is an Ai-powered tech platform that matches cancer patients with the right clinical trials for their exact diagnosis. TrialJectory also gives pharmaceutical companies and CROs access to patient insights to allow them to effectively design and recruit for clinical trials. Tzvia explains, "TrialJectory can really be the place where you can easily see all your options, understand all your options, and act upon your options. And by that remove barriers that exist today in patient access to clinical trials and patient access to the most advanced precision offering that exists today for cancer patients." "I think it's taking some things that have been partially provided, not integrated, and also taking it to the next level of really using smart technology and leveraging it to really personalize it and help and make it relevant and to the patient themselves." #Cancer #PatientChampion #CancerCare #CancerTreatment #CancerJourney #ClinicalTrials #AI #AIPlatform #DiversityinClinicalTrials TrialJectory.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Nick West is the Chief Medical Officer and DVP, Global Medical Affairs in Vascular for Abbott and is back on the podcast to talk about their Beyond Intervention global research.  This second annual survey looks at hurdles in the patient journey to see where improvements can be made in the patient experience. Nick explains, "So the year two survey, again, global survey, we went to 13 different geographies, conducted nearly 2000 interviews, half of which with patients, about a quarter with physicians, and then probably slightly less with healthcare leaders or administrators. And we really focused on that upstream portion of the patient journey, from people becoming patients, the awareness and development of symptoms, how that led to interfacing with healthcare, and then diagnostic testing." "The uncomfortable truth is that patients simply are not getting a good experience. If we look at patients with coronary disease or peripheral arterial disease, there is a huge disconnect between the quality of care that both physicians and healthcare administrators think they're providing and what the patients perceive they are achieving. And we see that for both groups, but there's even more of a disconnect for patients with peripheral arterial disease." @AbbottCardio #ClinicalTrials #VascularDisease #PAD #PeripheralArteryDisease #CAD #CoronaryArteryDisease #PatientJourney Abbott.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Dan Gold is the President and CEO of MEI Pharma and is tackling non-Hodgkin's B cell lymphoma to bring a therapy to patients minimizing the toxicities that are associated with current treatments. Their drug candidate zandelisib is a P13K delta inhibitor. It is being studied in lymphoma in B cells to determine if this is a way to block signaling and diminish the malignant capacity of the B cell. Dan explains, "We sort of think of lymphoma in two flavors. it's either a more chronic disease, or it's a more aggressive disease, and then there is sort of a spectrum that spans that. In the less aggressive, we call it indolent diseases, the patients will live with these cancers for many, many years. " "So for the cancers that we treat most commonly or that we're studying most commonly, they're more of the indolent variety. It is interesting because the fact that it's indolent, the patients will respond to therapies. But, eventually, the efficacy of that therapy will wane, and they'll need something else. But there are a number of options that can be staged over the years, again, to keep that cancer at bay, or at least minimally invasive and minimally problematic for many, many years. That's the area that we're focusing all of our energies on currently." "What we have done, and what we have strived to do is to diminish those toxicities so that the patient will stay on the drug as long as possible. So what we've kind of pioneered for this class of drugs, because of the properties of zandelisib, is that we initially give the patient the drug on a daily basis for a couple of months to get that tumor at bay and shrink it as much as we can." @MEI_Pharma $MEIP #Lymphoma #BloodCancer #P13K #P13KDelta #OptimizedDosing #SanDiego meipharma.com Download the transcript here

Justin Miller is the VP of Customer Success at eVisit and has recently returned from a tour of client sites to see how telehealth is functioning particularly in the real-world application of the Emergency Triage, Treat, and Transport (ET3) emergency medical response model. eVisit is the only end-to-end enterprise care delivery platform built for hospitals and healthcare systems with a focus on the virtual care space.  Justin explains, "So Emergency Triage, Treat and Transport is effectively a model where telehealth is now engaged in this innovative approach to care delivery. And so typically, a medic would show up after a 911 call on someone's doorstep, sometimes on the worst day of someone's life, right? But they're showing up in these situations that are sometimes things like motor vehicle accidents. Sometimes they're things like, I'm having a behavioral health crisis. Sometimes they are things like, I actually don't have a primary care physician, and I believe that I need care right away, but it isn't emergency. That whole continuum ends up making a 911 call on a regular basis." "GMR, Global Medical Response, is the company that has effectively taken telehealth and placed it with their medics and inside ambulances. When someone shows up on scene, they can do a quick assessment and verify if this person should be transported because it's a highly emergent situation, or if this person is actually appropriate to treat via virtual care. And if indeed they are able to be treated via virtual care, they would conduct a brief intake and get that person with a doctor right away." @eVisit #VirtualCare #DigitalHealth #Telehealth #Telemedicine evisit.com Download the transcript here

Bill Hinshaw is the President and CEO of Axcella Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech company founded by Flagship Pioneering, Founder of Moderna. Using their platform to create compositions of endogenous metabolic modulators, EMMs, Axcella has generated two liver programs including 1125 for treating NASH.  Preclinical and clinical data led them to test 1125 for long COVID fatigue in conjunction with Dr. Betty Raman Senior Clinical Research Fellow in the Radcliffe Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford. Bill explains, "So 1125 is a composition of amino acids and their derivatives, which is put together to address specific biologies. And we have tested it all the way into phase 2b in NASH patients. And what we've seen is it has an effect on important energy aspects, so bioenergetics, along with inflammatory redox, and immune and muscle functions." "And what happens, in this case, is that basically, the virus comes in, hijacks the mitochondria to help it reproduce or redirect its efforts towards producing more virus. And when it does that, it damages the cell itself and its ability to create energy." "Dr. Raman likes to talk about the fact that there's a battery, think of it as a rechargeable battery but unfortunately, in this case, the battery is damaged and it can't hold its charge. And so what 1125 is looking to do is to repair the battery's processes through areas like fatty acid oxidation, ATP generation, immune enhancement, as well as inflammatory reduction." #Axcella #AxcellaLongCovid #AxcellaTherapeutics #OxfordLongCOVID #LongCOVID #COVID19 #COVID #ChronicFatigueLongCOVID #LongHaulers #ClinicalTrials AxcellaTx.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Betty Raman is the Senior Clinical Research Fellow in the Radcliffe Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford and has been studying the effects of COVID-19 since the pandemic began to better understand the effects of COVID on multiple organ systems. Betty elaborates, "At Oxford, we've led a program where hundreds of patients recovering from COVID-19 volunteered to participate in our study. We undertook comprehensive assessments on magnetic resonance imaging, as well as cardiopulmonary exercise testing and blood tests." "What has come out from all this work is that a significant proportion of people recovering from moderate to severe and even mild COVID continue to experience lingering symptoms of fatigue, pain in various parts of the body, breathlessness and difficulty breathing. Some patients also report post-exertional breathlessness, post-exertional malaise." "So, we were quite interested in this new drug that Axcella wanted to test out, which had potential benefits for mitochondrial dysfunction, which we think may be playing a role in some symptoms that long COVID patients have experienced. And so, we have designed a study, which is aimed at fatigue dominant long COVID patients who are recovering from COVID-19 and continue to experience symptoms of fatigue. And we're going to see whether this new treatment has any effects on symptoms of fatigue in patients." @BR_CMR #LongCovid #ChronicFatigueLongCovid #OxfordLongCovid #AxcellaLongCovid #LongHaulers #COVID19 #COVID #ClinicalTrials Rdm.ox.ac.uk Download the transcript here

Dr. Antonia Chen is the Director of Research for the Division of Adult Reconstruction and a surgeon performing total joint arthroplasty in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital. In addition to informing surgeons and other healthcare professionals about ways to avoid surgical site infections, Antonia emphasizes there is also a need to educate patients about preoperative actions to optimize them for surgery. Antonia explains, "Surgical site infections unfortunately still plague us today, and they basically are infections that happen after surgery. It can happen in any patient and after any surgery. There are some surgeries that have a higher likelihood of it and some surgeries that don't. What happens is that after we make a cut through the skin due to surgery, the bacteria on your skin that is natural can actually get into your wound and potentially cause a surgical site infection or SSI." "It's really nice to have something inside the wound to prevent the bacteria from growing. So Ethicon has a Plus Antibacterial suture, and it is the only commercially available suture that can prevent persistent risk from surgical infection by reducing the risk of infection." "I really appreciate Ethicon for putting together a campaign they call Zero Starts With One. The idea is that we want to go to zero surgical site infections, and it starts with one person at a time, one prevention at a time, one patient, one healthcare provider at a time." @BrighamWomens #SurgicalSiteInfections #ZeroStartsWithOne #Ethicon brighamandwomens.org Download the transcript here  

Dan Greenleaf is the President and CEO of Modivcare and is presenting a complete solution for vulnerable patients whose healthcare outcomes are most affected by recognized social determinants of health. Dan elaborates, "But our view is it's not necessarily about the clinical intervention. It's about having access to the healthcare system through transportation. It's about getting a nutritious meal on a daily basis or meals on a daily basis. It's about in the event you need somebody to help you with activities of daily living that we can provide that member a caregiver. Or it's about remote monitoring where we have a way to be in kind of a constant conversation with that patient about whether it be their vitals, whether it be about medications, or whether it be about personal emergency response systems." "We're a one-of-a-kind company doing what we're doing right now. I joined this company two years ago. It was largely a transportation company, but it did have access to 25 million lives at the time. We're 30 million now. And it became abundantly clear to me that our payers, our states, our members, our case managers all want a holistic solution and a one-stop-shop for our members." @Modivcare #SupportiveCare #SocialDeterminantsofHealth #SDOH #HealthEquity #PersonalCare #RemotePatientMonitoring #RPM #nemt #FoodInsecurity Modivcare.com Download the transcript here.  

Kathy Lee-Sepsick is the President, CEO, and Founder of Femasys, and not looking at minor levels of improvement in women's healthcare, but products and technologies that change the standard of care.  With a focus on reproductive health, they are looking at infertility as well as a permanent birth control option for women. Kathy explains, "So one of our major products is called FemVue. And what we did here is another example of what we're trying to do in these other product categories. We have developed a way to move an essential test for infertility diagnosis from radiology back to her GYN, utilizing ultrasound. So FemVue offers a saline and air contrast, or we call it bubbles, where those bubbles enable the evaluation and viewing of her fallopian tubes, which is suspect when a physician is evaluating all potential infertility factors." "And at the same time, we are also advancing through clinical trial work, our FemBloc solution, which is our permanent birth control option for women. And both of those are delivered in an office environment. OBGYNs are performing the FemBloc procedure, and that's performed domestically as well in an active clinical trial." @FemasysInc #ReproductiveHealth #WomensHealth #BirthControl #Infertility #FemBloc #FemVue Femasys.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Aharona Shuali is the Vice President of Medical Affairs at Nucleix developing a liquid biopsy to detect cancer. It can be a blood test or a urine test that looks at DNA, but it doesn't look at DNA as mutations. Rather, it's looking to detect changes in methylation which are small molecules that are sitting on the DNA and have shown to be much more important than mutations in the early detection of cancer. Aharona explains, "What we do is a unique approach that is actually using enzymes. We have a very good signal-to-noise ratio. So I'll just talk a little bit about the standard. It is usually bisulfite, and bisulfite is a chemical that is very harsh. So it usually degrades, it ruins up to 90% of the DNA, and then it also introduces a lot of noise. So when you find the low amount of DNA in the blood that is coming from the tumor, if you treat it with bisulfite, you actually are going to destroy most of it. Then what is remaining is going to be very hard to tell if this is a real signal or it's actually noise." "However, our platform is using a proprietary enzymatic-based approach, which actually does not destroy the DNA at all and has very low noise. So we believe that this approach can tell you, even with very minute amounts of DNA floating in the blood coming from the tumor, we'll be able to detect the signal from the tumor itself." @nucleix2 #LungCancer #BladderCancer #LungEpiCheck #SanDiego Nucleix.com Download the transcript here