Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Steve Worland is President and CEO of eFFECTOR Therapeutics a pioneer in the Genomics 3.0 category putting to work the research on selective translation regulator inhibitors (STRIs) and the key ways that cancer cells change their behavior and also change the immune system. Steve says, "There are two revolutions in cancer in the last 10 to 15 years-- targeted therapies and immunotherapies. And we think STRIs is a third way to compliment one or both of those. And really with the idea here is that you could control a cancer for a long period of time. It's very hard to completely eradicate every tumor and every cancer cell in your body.  "But if you can restore control, your immune system can control the cancer. Hopefully, patients can live for years knowing they have the disease but not having it debilitate their daily life." #eFFECTORTherapeutics #NSCLC #STRIs #cancer #SPAC eFFECTOR.com Download the transcript here

Bret Larsen is the CEO and Co-Founder of eVisit, a virtual care platform that is serving the largest health systems in the country to establish remote access for a telemedicine solution that works for patients as well as hospitals, doctors, and administrators. Bret says, "One of the things the pandemic accelerated in a big, big way was the consumerization of care. It forced us, as consumers, not patients, but consumers, to look for more options. With many physical encounters being closed or highly limited, we had to start looking for other options." "I strongly believe that the future exam room will be your living room, or your bedroom, or somewhere where you can be diagnosed and suggested treatment, and then directed to the most appropriate point of care, whether that be an asynchronous interaction, a synchronous interaction, or the physical exam room at the hospital. So, the interoperability piece is enormous. It stands to accelerate the improvement of patient outcomes in a big, big way." The eVisit Enterprise Virtual Care Platform was named the Solo Leader by Forrester Research in The Forrester Wave ™: Virtual Care Platforms for Digital Health, Q1 2021.  Download your complimentary report here. @BretALarsen @eVisit #Telehealth #VirtualCare #Telemedicine #DigitalHealth eVisit.com Download the transcript here    

John Zaleski Ph.D. NREMT, CAP, CPHIMS is the head of clinical informatics at Capsule. The topic is medical device integration to track progress and improve hospital care with continuous patient data collection and surveillance with prompts for action. John says, "Aside from the physics of actually connecting and pulling the data, there are all sorts of IT-related issues of how to store the data, how to correctly format the data for communication. Now, there are standards that have been developed over the years that are in use today that tend to make those types of challenges less formidable. But having data access from any location in the hospital continues to be a little bit of a challenge in terms of lower acuity settings versus higher acuity settings." "And so you have a mix of devices that do communicate, a mix of devices that communicate in a proprietary manner, and then medical devices that communicate more ubiquitously using standards like Health Level 7, various flavors of the Health Level 7 standard. It's a mishmash. But as time goes on and devices are migrated out of the environment, and newer ones are migrated in, they typically are adhering to a standard, which is a flavor of HL7." #ActionableInsights #ConnectedCare #ClinicianBurnout #HealthIT #MedicalDeviceIntegration #PtSafety #CapsuleTech CapsuleTech.com Download the transcript here

Emily Parks is a behavioral and patient advocate and the Founder of POP! --Pissed Off Patients-- with a mission to educate healthcare professionals and patients about medical PTSD. Born with a rare intestinal illness called Myopathic intestinal pseudo-obstruction, her own medical journey has led to awareness about medical PTSD and the drive to pursue a Ph.D. in medical trauma and become a patient advocate. Emily says, "I find as an adult, a lot of the trauma that I've received in the healthcare system and interacting with the healthcare system has impacted me in how I socialize with both providers and non-providers as much as friends." "Socially, it's impacted my thinking style. It's impacted my ability to trust and connect with others. And so that is what POP! is about. What is Medical PTSD, and how does it manifest in you? What are some coping mechanisms?" #MedicalPTSD #PTSD #PTSDAwareness #MedicalTrauma #PatientSafety #PatientExperience #RareDisease POPMedicalPTSD.org Download the transcript here

James McArthur Ph.D. is the CEO of PepGen and talks about applying their enhanced delivery cell-penetrating peptide technology to treat rare genetic neuromuscular diseases. The lead diseases PepGen is focused on are Duchenne muscular dystrophy, treatable with an exon 51 skipping oligonucleotide, as well as myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1), both rare genetic diseases with high unmet medical needs. James says. "For a long period of time, we've known that we can fundamentally change the outcome of many diseases with oligonucleotide therapeutics. But the great challenge has been getting enough of these oligos, as they're often called, into the cells where they need to do essentially the job of changing disease outcomes." #PepGenPioneers #Oligonucleotide #Neuromuscular #RareDiseases #DuchenneMscularDystrophy #MyotonicDystrophy #DM1 #DMD Pepgen.com Download the transcript here

Glenn Mattes is the CEO of TFF Pharmaceuticals, with a hybrid business model developing an internal portfolio of products and also working with external partners to apply thin film freezing technology. The first compounds are voriconazole, an antifungal being developed for treating invasive pulmonary aspergillosis, and tacrolimus, for lung transplant patients. Other compounds are targeting COVID-19. Glenn says, "So our thin film freezing technology has the ability to transform pharmaceutical products, mostly solid pharmaceutical products, into dry powder formulations. One characteristic that is common to most pharmaceutical compounds is that they're rather poorly water absorbed. So when they are made into a drug, the ability to get enough product into the bloodstream or the plasma means you have to dose the compound at a pretty high level, and you butt up against sort of the adverse events profile." "So, by using thin film freezing, you ultimately can lead to a lower dose of the drug being administered directly to the lung. Therefore you have the opportunity to improve on the efficacy and safety profile of the product that you're working on." $TFFP #ThinFilmFreezing #InhalableTherapies #Voriconazole #Tacrolimus #COVID19 TFFPharma.com Download the transcript here

Alain Maiore is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mnemo Therapeutics and has a mission to change the future of cell therapy.  The Mnemo platform EnfiniT is an integrated drug discovery engine that combines T-cell engineering technologies with greater target identification to transform the body's immune response to overcome currently incurable diseases. Mnemo has just raised $90 million in a Series A round, the largest round to date in France. Alain says, "I think our job is to make sure that whatever technology we put together, everyone that is in need of having access to these drugs gets access to these drugs. So it is our responsibility to combine the technologies and medical development and the manufacturing of these drugs so that we can size the necessity of financial performance and shoulder reward with accessibility to every patient. That responsibility is increasingly important in the world that is opening to us." @MnemoTx #MnemoTherapeutics #EnfiniT #Cancer #BloodCancer #CellTherapies #SolidTumors #DrugTargeting #TCells #Immunetherapies #epigenetics #CarTCells Mnemo-tx.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Pier Vincenzo Piazza is Co-Founder and CEO of Aelis Farma, a biotechnology company targeting disorders induced by external cannabinoids, the chemical compounds contained in cannabis.  These cannabis-related disorders include addiction, cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, and psychosis and are related to how the CB1 receptor is stimulated by cannabinoids. Pier says, "The CB1 is a very interesting receptor for several reasons. First of all, is one of the neurotransmitter receptors the most expressed in the brain. So in your brain, one of the neurotransmitter receptors that you have the most of is the CB1 that is consequently involved in a large number of functions." "Another thing that is interesting about these receptors is that people are all different, you, me, even your son and daughter are different. However, we all share something that is absolutely identical in all of us--that is, the CB1 because the receptor CB1 has no variance between human beings. It's one of the few receptors that is 100% identical in everyone." Listen to the podcast and download the transcript to gain insight into the new molecules being developed as inhibitors of bad activity of the CB1 receptor. #AelisFarma #cannabis #cannabisdisorders #braindisorders #CUD #CIP #cannabinoids AelisFarma.com Download the transcript here.

Jim Joyce is the Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Sigyn Therapeutics, and we talk about removing inflammatory targets from the bloodstream with advanced blood purification technology. Jim says, "The next transformative step in the recipe of blood purification is the advancement of devices that can address the sources of inflammation, which could be a viral or a bacterial source, in concert with the depletion of inflammatory cytokines and other modulators from the bloodstream." "You need the ability to quickly modulate down these inflammatory cytokines, but you also need to be able to address the source of inflammation.  The source of inflammation continues to stimulate the immune response. The source of inflammation in COVID-19 is obviously the viral pathogen itself and related bacterial infections. We're very focused on looking at bacterial toxins as well." #BloodPurification #COVID19 #Cytokinestorm #Cytokine #Sepsis  #Innovation #MedTwitter SigynTherapeutics.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Nick West is the Chief Medical Officer and Divisional Vice President of Global Medical Affairs at Abbott's Vascular Business. Nick points out the need to make sure the blood vessel is properly closed up at the end of a procedure to ensure no complications.  While the Abbott device Perclose™ has been around for quite some time, the ProStyle™ is the new version of it and is a unique suture mediated closure system. Nick reminds us that, "The old way of doing this is simply to press. Now pressing on the artery, usually, you have to press for at least 10 minutes. If it's done properly, that seals things very nicely, but there are many, many factors that affect the availability of what we call manual compression to seal these punctures. They include where the puncture was, how many times the physician needed to attempt to puncture the vessel before they got into it." Nick confirms this is the way bleeding has been stopped for hundreds of years and that pressing on the groin is medieval.  We talk about how this new approach is a way to effectively close the puncture site in an artery or vein with sutures that allow for primary intentional healing. @AbbottCardio #AbbottCardio #Perclose #ProStyle #VascularClosure #VascularRepair Abbott.com Download the transcript here