Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Kimberly Kilby is the Vice-President and Medical Director of Health and Wellbeing at MVP Health Care. Trained as a family and preventive physician, Kimberly is focused on the patient journey and expanding the options for virtual care. MVP collaborates with virtual care providers and other digital health solutions, supporting virtual primary care, urgent care, chronic care management, and specialty care. Kimberly explains, "We want to be sure that patients are finding options for virtual care that are actually high-quality medicine but also thoughtfully integrated into the rest of their care continuum. That's part of the professional reason why a physician is dedicated to that key customer experience as you expand options in the virtual care space." "A lot of the data is showing that patient and consumer preferences within healthcare have obviously changed dramatically, and patients are looking for more convenience and availability. And I'm really charged with determining which of the innovative options people are migrating to are actually high value and improve care and don't really add waste to the system." @MVPHealthCare #DigitalHealth #Telemedicine #VirtualPrimaryCare #VirtualUrgentCare MVPHealthCare.com Download the transcript here

Mai-Britt Zocca is the Founder, CEO, and President of IO Biotech, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Denmark. They are developing immune modeling cancer therapies based on their T-win technology. Using these cancer vaccines, pre-existing T-cells are being directed in patients to attack and eliminate solid tumors. Mai-Britt explains, "Currently, we have a leading program that is in Phase 3. So, this is in first-line advanced melanoma. We have a breakthrough therapy designation granted by the FDA, based on the earlier data that we have seen in melanoma. Our targets also are able to be used in other cancer indications. We are not melanoma per se. We are already running trials in first-line solid tumors where we are including also lung, head, neck, and bladder cancer." "What we do is vaccinate, as I mentioned before, and the vaccination process is a combination of first a booster program, where we give vaccination or injections several times. Then we have a maintenance phase after that. This is where we see that after these vaccinations, where we vaccinate against the tumor environment, we generate the T-cells that can react towards the immune suppressive mechanisms that we know are hindering the effect of the T-cells in these patients." #IOBiotech #Melanoma #CancerVaccine #Immunotherapy #Cancer #ImmunoOncology IOBiotech.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Hernan Bazan is the CEO and Co-Founder of South Rampart Pharma and focuses on finding a new way to treat acute and chronic pain with a drug that has no expectation for abuse and is not toxic to the liver, kidneys, or cardiovascular system. Hernan explains, "This is a tremendous unmet need in that there really has been no innovation in the pain space for over 50 years. Tylenol itself, acetaminophen, Tylenol was born in the '40s and the early '50s and worked by actually someone that was at the NIH that came to visit us a few times, a very well renowned neuroscientist. And he really discovered it incidentally, looking for another pathway, but we won't go into that. And that was adopted by McNeil Laboratories, and then eventually Johnson & Johnson." "And then, in the '60s and '70s, non-steroidals, non NSAIDs, were marketed as Advil and ibuprofen, and a bunch of NSAIDs were derived. And these are very good medicines for preventing inflammation and treating pain in the short term. The challenge with both of these classes of pain meds is that they have risks." "And then the third class, obviously, everybody knows about opioids and how they were marketed in the '90s." @SR_Pharma #Pain #AcutePain #Analgesic #Acetaminophen #Opioid #NSAID #Nontoxic #NonOpioid #NewOrleans southrampartpharma.com Download the transcript here

Sheila Frame is the President for the Americas at Amryt Pharma, founded on the belief that rare and ultra-rare diseases were an opportunity to support underserved patients differently than the big pharmaceutical companies could. With the acquisition of Mycapssa, Amryt is changing the treatment for the rare disease acromegaly from painful injections to the first and only twice-daily oral medication. Shelia explains, "We're currently commercially, at least, in three different areas. So lipodystrophy is a pretty significant leptin deficiency for people who suffer from that. It's a fairly rare disease, with about 300 patients roughly in the US. The second one is in homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia, and again, a very rare genetic disease, probably even fewer patients than what we see in lipodystrophy. And then the third area, of course, is acromegaly with Mycapssa, where we actually have products in the market." "I think what's interesting about not only the technology that we have with Mycapssa but also the impact of taking a pill twice a day means that you have this sustained control of the drug in your system. I think patients are finding that that really helps them. And so beyond just the convenience of not having to go through monthly objections, but also just the way they feel by having that sustained control and the drug in their system." @AmrytPharma #Amryt #Acromegaly #Endocrinology #RareDisease #Mycapssa Acromegalycommunity.org Amrytpharma.com Download the transcript here

Allison London Brown is the CEO of LUMINELLE, inventors of an advanced endoscopic system with a camera and biopsy device that allows physicians to perform gynecological procedures in their offices more safely, more efficiently, and with better reimbursement. Being able to look inside the uterus and bladder and perform operations that in the past would have required a hospital outpatient visit means that women and their doctors are more likely to identify problems sooner and get a prompt diagnosis of cancerous tissues. Allison elaborates, "If you have problems, it can also help with things like drug delivery for overactive bladder. And it can be used for fertility, both treatments, as well as trying to prevent pregnancy. So it's a pretty versatile system. It's very low cost, and it's really so that women can have procedures done in the comfort of their physician's office with less anesthesia and certainly less cost." "And for the payers, if you're catching things sooner, you're not incurring all these costs that you might in a hospital, like the anesthesiologist and all the nurses and all the different things that go along with the hospital outpatient procedure. It's much more beneficial for them as well. So it's really a nice move to try to get people care the first time at the first place they should be going." #LUMINELLE #Endoscopy #MedicalDevice #WomensHealth #UterineCancer LUMINELLE360.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Emily Hamilton is the Senior Vice President of Clinical Research at PeriGen, which is applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to early warning and clinical decision support in healthcare. With a focus on labor and delivery, PeriGen is providing real-time information to clinicians to drive down the likelihood of birth-related brain injury. Emily explains, "So, what we have developed is an AI machine learning-based way of looking at the tracing to identify contractions, to notify nurses and doctors that there are excessive contractions, and that's gone on for a while. We've also used that to recognize patterns in the fetal heart rate, which indicate that the baby's not responding well to labor and to notify them of that so that they can intervene and prevent the adverse outcome." "Likewise, we can look at the labor, and we can compare a patient's labor to a group of similar women who are having the same frequency of contractions, a number of other variables, and indicate whether or not this labor is on course or whether or not it's slower or perhaps faster. It's all done in a very consistent, quantifiable way." @PeriGen #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning #ML #WomensHealth #LaborandDelivery #BirthRelatedBrainInjury Perigen.com Download the transcript here

Arjan Haverhals is the CEO and President of Milestone Scientific, which is exploring how to modernize hypodermic syringe use. One application of their injection technology is for women during labor and delivery to inject the epidural needle more accurately and control the pain. Milestone is also looking at dentistry, chronic pain, neuro-surgery, and cosmetic medicine as additional opportunities to deliver more efficient, precise, and safer injections. Arjan provides a historical perspective, "Just to give you some background information from a study from last year. It was found that even when male and female patients expressed the same amount of pain, female patients' pain is often seen as less intense and more likely to benefit from psychotherapy versus medication as compared to men's pain. And I do believe that this gender gap in healthcare could lead to bias diagnoses related to chronic pain for women and may also explain why very little has changed in the field of epidural delivery. And any way we can aid in closing that gap is a win-win." "Now, if women go for labor and delivery these days, it is still a technology that is used stemming from the 1860s, and it is nothing more or less than a hypodermic syringe, later positioned in the medical field as the loss of resistance technique, which is a very manual, subjective way of placing the epidural needle in the epidural space. And the reason why we entered this field is a strong belief that we can solve the problems, and the associated risk factors, with this high-risk epidural analgesia procedure." @MilestoneSciInc #CompuFlov#WomensHealth #Pregnancy #LaborandDelivery #Epidural #DuralPuncture #MedicalDevice #MedTech MilestoneScientific.com Download the transcript here

Daniel Teper is the CEO and Founder of Cytovia Therapeutics and talks about using natural killer, NK, cells as an alternative to T-cells in immuno-oncology. He shares insights about the development of induced pluripotent stem cells, IPSC-derived NK cells, iNK cells, used by themselves or using their Flex-NK cell Engagers or in combination to address the challenges cancer patients face. Daniel elaborates, "That's also where the NK cells may have advantages over T-cells, in that it hasn't been reported that they cause CRS, GBHD, or other side effects that would require the patients to be kept in the hospital. Now, if we say the first iteration was derived from the patient's own blood, the second iteration is donor, the third generation, which we are one of a handful of companies to pursue and master, is the production of immune cells, including NK cells, from induced pluripotent stem cells." "We see also that you can direct the cells in two ways. You can direct the cells by inserting what's called a CAR, or chimeric antigen receptor, that's like a GPS on the cell. But alternatively, we can redirect the NK cells to kill the tumor cells by combining them with antibodies, and particularly with what we call NK engager antibodies. So our brand of NK engager antibodies is called Flex-NK cell engager antibodies. And what they do is that they have one arm that binds and activates the NK cell, and another arm that binds into the tumor cell, and the NK cells are redirected to kill the tumor cells." @Cytovia #CytoviaTX #Oncology #ImmunoOncology #Cancer #CancerTherapeutics #CellTherapeutics #NKCells #iNKCells #NaturalKillerCells CytoviaTX.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Phil Kantoff is the CEO and Co-Founder and Alex Brown is the COO of Convergent Therapeutics which is developing the next generation of targeted therapies to treat cancer. Drawing on insights from developments in radiopharmaceuticals, Convergent focuses on radioantibodies that are radioisotopes attached to antibodies directed to treat prostate cancer. Phil explains, "Antibodies will recognize surface molecules on cancer cells and they can be linked to radioisotopes. We are focused on an isotope known as Actinium-225, which is an important radioisotope because it's different than isotopes that have been previously used, it's an alpha-emitting radiopharmaceutical. Alpha particles are much larger, they're much more powerful, and they travel a shorter distance. You can deliver a very powerful, very targeted therapy to cancer." "We have clinical trials that are taking place right now that are showing remarkable activity using the combination of the directed antibody against prostate cancer cells, specifically prostate-specific membrane antigen coupled to this isotope, Actinium-225." Alex continues, "Our radioantibodies, which is what we're talking about here, are novel enough that there are few if any, examples of marketed products out there. It's a field that's emerging, so aside from having the experience in antibody development and commercialization, some of this is new to our team as well as to others." @ConvergentRx @DrPhilKantoff #ProstateCancer #Radiopharmaceuticals #PSMA #Radioantibody #RadioLingandTherapy #Oncology #Biotechnology ConvergentRx.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Eric Brouwer is the Chief Scientific Officer for SQI Diagnostics, which believes that lung health is human health. Their focus is on the lung and ranges from COVID PCR, antigen, and antibody tests, across the spectrum to assessing lung transplant donors. With demand going up for lung transplants and new protocols for COVID screening of donors, diagnostic tests help better identify good candidates for organ donors. Eric elaborates, "We're a Canadian-based company, and we have the distribution rights in Canada for a technology that was developed by the US military. The product is called Biomeme, and it's a portable PCR analyzer. So it does very rapid thermocycling that will enable the results to be delivered in just over two hours." "This is deployed in mines and remote locations, on TV and film crew sets, and so that technology exists. We're using it, and that really makes that testing cycle reduced, so we can get same-morning tests, same-day testing, versus sending it in to a central lab which has the travel time, which has the review time, which has the execution time, that's pushing four to eight, sometimes 24 hours, before those results can get back. So the technology is out there, and it's becoming more widely available." #SQI #COVID #COVIDTesting #PCRTest #Lungs #LungTransplants #Antibodies #Inflammation #LungDiagnostics #TransplantDiagnostics #PrecisionMedicine SQIDiagnostics.com Download the transcript here