Empowered Patient Podcast

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

Nataly Youssef Ph.D. is the Co-Founder of Reclaim Health trained as an industrial engineer, with expertise in operations research, AI, and big data. Nataly explains, "So this is the genesis of Reclaim. Really being able to provide that tool for patients, to be able to be well informed about both their health insurance and then to be able to manage their healthcare bills in the very context of that health insurance, all data-driven basically. This is all personalized to their own claims data, to their own information, and to provide them with these actionable items, actionable recommendations, in the context of their own journey." "We sort of say, most of the people that I ask recommended X, Y, and Z, and that's why I'm going with X, Y, and Z. But imagine AI doing exactly the same, but at a scale of asking millions of people that could look like you. And, as a result, be able to really democratize these insights of all of our experiences and being able to make it available to each one of us. But the importance not only is in the AI, but it's how you actually represent the insights from AI so that they are actionable for someone." @reclaimapp #HealthInsurance #DigitalHealth #HealthSavings #AIinHealth #AI ReclaimHealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Waqaas Al-Siddiq is the Founder and CEO of Biotricity and a leader in the development of mobile cardiac telemetry, MCT, devices to provide real-time, continuous monitoring of at-risk patients. Waqaas explains, "One of the core areas that we strongly focus on is long-term data collection in this real-time intelligent monitoring. When you talk about our core product, which is Bioflux, which is used for diagnostics, we are talking about a device that has built-in algorithms, that's FDA cleared, as well as the algorithms to collect data from a patient, determine if there is an emergency or an anomaly, and then alert somebody for emergency response. "Most importantly, we have three channels of data. Three channels of data means that we have three different views of the heart. What that does is that it creates more data. More data means better accuracy and a better diagnosis. The standard in the MCT space is actually two channels. With three contact points, two channels. To get three contact points, you need five access points. That's what everybody else is doing in the industry. But then patients don't like five connectivity points. These devices are just more cumbersome to wear. What we did at Biotricity, which is incredibly unique, is to create a three channel, three contact point system, which is proprietary to us. This leads to better algorithms and better analytics." @Biotricity_Inc $BTCY #MedTech #MedicalDevice #Healthcare #ChronicDisease #Cardiology #CardiacCare #Diagnostics #Prevention #Patient Biotricity.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Jennifer Jones-McMeans is the Divisional Vice President of Global Clinical Affairs at Abbott's Vascular Business. She talks about recently released data from their Beyond Intervention Survey of 1800 stakeholders including 1289 vascular disease patients, 408 healthcare physicians, and 173 healthcare leaders from across 13 countries. The study looked particularly at Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD) and Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) which revealed these diseases disproportionately affect Black, Latino, and Native Americans. Jennifer reports, "I think what Beyond Intervention allowed us to do is to see what the patient is feeling, experiencing, and how does that differ from what your healthcare provider or your healthcare leader is saying? Because one of the key findings that we found was that patient experience is maybe not as good as the healthcare provider may be thinking it is." "And we know that when you look at these social determinants, and they can be anything from socioeconomic status, availability to care, education, impact of income, they all collide. And many times in certain areas, they can collide with race and ethnicity. So when you put people in an environment that is not supportive of health and that you're just reaching so many of the things that I spoke of before, you put them at risk for development of diseases, such as PAD and CAD." @AbbottCardio #ClinicalTrials #VascularDisease #PAD #PeripheralArteryDisease #CAD #CoronaryArteryDisease #SDOH #SocialDeterminantsofHealth Abbott.com Download the transcript here

Lauren Walrath is Vice President of Public Affairs in North America, and Susan Thiele is Director of Advocacy and Brand Communications at Kyowa Kirin, a Japan-based global specialty pharmaceutical company known for its cutting-edge scientific discoveries in four therapeutic areas including neurology, nephrology, hematological cancers, and immunology. Lauren explains their approach to patient-centric discovery, "In advocacy, we're really trying to find where the gaps are and how we can best work with partners to make long-term and sustainable improvements for patients. So that can be in the form of starting new research, funding new grants, addressing disparities, working on developing new education programs. Generally, we're looking for meaningful opportunities to help patients and their families on their journey from diagnosis to treatment. We work closely with the advocates, and we bring all of that understanding back to our teams here at Kyowa Kirin so that we really can engage our cross-functional partners in doing more to help the patients we serve." Susan elaborates, "And then there is Jim and Jeffrey who have Sézary syndrome, which is a more serious form of CTCL that affects less than 5% of the patients. What we've done is we've captured their journeys in their own voice, the journey to diagnosis, their experience on treatment, and ultimately what they've learned along the way, what really keeps them motivated to not give up. And people can now hear those stories by going to POTELIGEO.com." #KyowaKirin #KKNA #DrugDevelopment #RareDiseases #Antibodies #immunology #Cancer #CTCL #Neurology #ParkinsonsDisease #NeurodegenerativeDiseases #Nephrology #HematologicalCancers #SezarySyndrome KyowaKirin.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Colin Banas is the Chief Medical Officer at DrFirst a health IT company that's been around for over 21 years. Started as an e-prescribing platform and developed expertise in medication management.  Colin explains, "What we as a company are hoping to do is empower patients by connecting the dots to help them get on therapy and stay on therapy. And so, one of the core things that we do as a company is around price transparency." "And when I say price transparency, what I'm really talking about is serving up data to the multiple parties involved in prescribing decisions. When I mention price transparency for a provider, for example, what I'm saying is at the moment of making that decision to write that prescription, ostensibly with the patient in front of me, or the encounter happening, so much of it now is virtual via telehealth. But at the moment of making that prescription decision, I can see what the patient's copay will be, what they're out of pocket will be. And that really lends itself to having a conversation at that moment in time." @DrFirst #PriceTransparency #Healthcare #Hospitals #HCTransparency #HealthcareCosts DrFirst.com Download the transcript here.

Bob Connelly is the CEO of Elicio Therapeutics which has figured out how to deliver immunotherapies from vaccines into the lymph nodes where they are activated to defeat cancer and infectious diseases. Bob says, "Our overall mission is to treat many different types of cancers primarily, but even to bring our technology into other areas like infectious diseases by engaging the lymph nodes, which are really the command center for the immune response in our body." "And to date, they really have not been a part of the cancer immunotherapy revolution that's really started over the last ten years and is very exciting. We're using a technology that initially is focused on KRAS mutation-driven cancers, which comprise 25% of all solid tumors. So we're in a trial right now where we have colorectal cancer patients, we have pancreatic cancer patients, but our lead program can apply in lung cancer, ovarian cancer, bile duct cancer." "In our bodies, albumin is a very large protein that is constantly circulating throughout the body from lymph node to lymph node. We basically hitchhike on that albumin. We've developed a technology that allows us to hitchhike on that albumin to the lymph nodes, and then hop off into the lymph node, be taken up into the lymph node where all the various aspects of the lymph node can then be brought to bear, to activate the therapeutic, expand it, and send it out on its mission." @ElicioTX #CancerVaccine #PancreaticCancer #Immunotherapy #lymphnodetargeting #Vaccines #KRASMutation Elicio.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Peter Altman is the President and CEO of BioCardia and emphasizes that heart disease is the leading cause of death in the Western world. BioCardia is developing technologies to treat cardiovascular diseases with cell and cell-derived therapies which allow for precise cell delivery in the heart and technologies associated with optimizing the selection of patients to find those most likely to respond to the therapy.  Peter explains, "In this setting, I think what's unique is there's a technology around that cell processing and around the cell delivery. I think what's most unique is these are autologous cells, as we've said, and because of how we're doing this, we can achieve, in appropriate patients with this point-of-care processing and the efficient delivery, we can deliver and create dosage forms that are not only more significant than others historically but are very inexpensive to provide for the patients. And that means it can have a real boon to the healthcare system." "Most autologous therapies they talk about are enormously expensive because it requires the cells to be shipped to a centralized laboratory and manipulated and processed and handled. And that impacts, really, the quality of the cells and can impact the safety because they're exposed to laboratories where many other cells are involved." "By processing them at point-of-care in, really, an almost closed system that's disposable, the patient's cells never leave the cardiac suite in which the procedure is performed, and the disposable cartridge in which they're processed is discarded. So they'll never be in an environment where they would be exposed to any other patient's cells." #BioCardia $BCDA #CardiAMP #HeartFailure #CellTherapy BioCardia.com Download the transcript here

Walter Wolf is the author of The Right Rehab: A Guide to Addiction and Mental Illness Recovery When Crisis Hits Your Family and also an interventionist.  He has written this book to highlight options for those with addictions and family members and friends who want to help find an effective treatment. Walter explains, "There are lots of books about addiction, about the clinical aspect of it, but there were no books whatsoever, there were no guides about how you get the right treatment for the right individual. So a few years go by, and ironically I'm now an interventionist and a treatment placement specialist. People come to me not only to intervene with loved ones because they need to go to treatment but also I match people up with the right treatment facility for them." "Until just recently, the conventional wisdom was that if somebody had an addiction, well, that was because that was a choice on that individual's part, and that choice meant that person had very low morals, had very low character. But in fact, we know now that addiction is actually a disease, and it's not something that people choose to do. In fact, it has very similar relapse rates, for example, diabetes or asthma or hypertension." #WalterWolf #Rehab #Addiction #Intervention #Interventionist #Recovery #RecoveryJourney #DrugAddiction #Opioids #ProcessAddiction #SubstanceAbuse The Right Rehab Download the transcript here

Boro Dropulić is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Caring Cross, a 501 (c)(3) non-profit dedicated to accelerating the development and manufacturing of advanced medicines to improve access to cures for all patients independent of where they live. Boro explains, "One way to reduce the cost is by manufacturing the product locally at, what we call, the clinical place-of-care rather than using a centralized manufacturing model that has traditionally been used for drug distribution. By using automated devices to ensure the consistency of the products while they're being made, for example, CAR-T cell products, they can be produced at a fraction of the cost than when they're made centrally, even a 10th of the cost with current cost and materials." "Once the CAR-T cell product is made, it is then reinfused back to the patient to have its anti-tumor effects. The most effective CAR-T cell products so far are autologous, meaning that they are from the patient's own cells and return back to the patient. There have been five FDA CAR-T cell products targeting diseases such as leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma that have been approved, and all are autologous CAR-T cell products." "I think there's a whole range of opportunities with gene therapies because we're trying to address the genetic defect rather than trying to treat the symptoms of disease, which many drugs do. So I think there are enormous opportunities for CAR-T cells and other gene therapies to actually be transformative and really help patients with single administration therapies. Because these cells are living medicines, they live in the body and have long-term effects." @Caring_Cross @GatesFoundation @amfAR @iasociety @globalgti #HIVcure #CARTcell #Immunotherapy #CaringCross CaringCross.org Download the transcript here