Empowered Patient Podcast

Greg Mayes, President and CEO of Reunion Neuroscience, is developing a psychedelic therapy for the treatment of postpartum depression. This serious acute, non-chronic mental health condition affects an estimated 20% of women after giving birth.  A phase two trial is underway to evaluate how RE-104, a rapid-acting psilocybin-like novel molecule, can help women with moderate to severe postpartum depression get faster relief compared to existing treatments. Greg explains, "The course of our psychedelic administration is significant because we believe it can be shorter in time period than other psilocybin-like treatments. In our case, we were able to establish it as 3.7 hours. Because it's a psychedelic and it is for an acute and non-chronic indication, we believe that women who take our product will see a rapid uptake and potentially day of administration benefit of the psychedelic therapy. Our phase two study is called the RECONNECT study because it's named for women reconnecting with themselves, their families, their children, and the world around them." "Postpartum depression is considered to be a subset depressive of major depressive disorder, major depressive order that's not put into remission after two treatments becomes treatment-resistant depression. There's also generalized anxiety disorder. We believe that RE104 and our lead product have a lot of legs to potentially go in this area. But as the CEO of the company, we want to stay focused. We know what we need to do first and foremost is we need to get our RECONNECT phase two proof of concept study and women with moderate to severe postpartum depression recruited. And we need to show that we can work there. Once we show that, we'll pivot to other indications. One is adjustment disorder in patients with cancer and with other major medical illnesses like Parkinson's disease, ALS, MS, or pulmonary fibrosis." #ReunionNeuro #PostPartumDepression #PPD #Psychedelics #Mothers #MentalHealth #Depression #RECONNECTStudy reunionneuro.com PPDReconnectstudy.com   Download the transcript here

Ben Backus, Chief Science Officer, and James Blaha, CEO and Founder of Vivid Vision, discuss their work addressing binocular dysfunctions and improving visual field testing. Their innovative visual test uses a consumer-grade VR headset to deliver a gamified, less stressful, more engaging experience for patients, encouraging longer, more frequent testing. This approach also improves dataset precision and overcomes barriers in clinical trials for new therapeutics for diseases such as glaucoma and macular degeneration, potentially accelerating the development of vision-saving treatments. Ben explains, "Vivid Vision addresses two conditions. One of them is binocular dysfunctions, which include conditions like amblyopia, strabismus, and convergence insufficiency. And the other one that we're really focusing strongly on now is visual field testing, which is especially important to use for monitoring people who have glaucoma. It also gets used for screening tests for glaucoma, and it's an especially important part of getting new therapeutics approved for any medication that is going to try to preserve your sight. That includes macular degeneration, a particular flavor of macular degeneration, degeneration called geographic atrophy, inherited retinal diseases, diabetic retinopathy, and stroke. It's the visual field test that we are putting the majority of our effort into, but we still also treat binocular dysfunction."   James elaborates, "I originally got started, I guess, because I grew up with some binocular vision disorders. I had a lazy eye and a crossed eye, also known as strabismus and amblyopia. And I had kind of the traditional experience as a kid where I was not cooperative with the treatments, wearing my eye patch, and doing eye exercises, and that sort of thing. And I wasn't successfully treated as a kid. About 60% of the time, that's the case in the US, where kids are not successfully treated for conditions. Then, when I was older, in my mid-twenties, I got interested in this topic through a TED talk by a neuroscientist, Sue Barry. That ultimately caused me to make the first prototypes, and I was able to gain 3D vision depth perception from some of those first prototypes. And that's ultimately what caused us to start the company." #VividVision #VRHealthcare #EyeHealth #MedicalTechnology #DigitalHealth #VisionTesting #Innovation #Glaucoma #MacularDegeneration #Amblyopia #HealthTech #VirtualReality #PatientCare #EarlyDetection #ClinicalTrials seevividly.com Download the transcript here

Erez Druk, CEO of Freed, was motivated to bring technology to the healthcare environment based on his wife's experience as a family medicine doctor.  Freed was founded to alleviate the provider's administrative burdens by leveraging AI to streamline pre-visit preparation, billing, and EHR maintenance.  The focus is on small and rural private practices, giving them tools to save time, reduce costs, and maintain their independence. Erez explains, "So the need that I identified, together with my wife Gabi, was that clinicians need more time in their lives. They want to spend less time on this admin work and more time again with their patients and families. And that was it, thinking about how we can use these new technologies and feel better products that really take care of that, help clinicians be happier and freer, hence the name Freed. Yes, super proud now to be supporting more than 25,000 clinicians who will use Freed to do a lot of this work for them. So that's how the need was identified for years of watching the pain, let's say."   "But my background is, so I studied mathematics and computer science back in Israel. So I'm originally from Israel. In the Technion, we like to think of Technion as the MIT of Israel. So I studied there as an undergrad, and then I moved to the Bay Area to work for Facebook as an engineer. I was very lucky to start on the same day on the same team with this guy named Andrey, who, 10 years later, after lots of convincing, is my co-founder and CTO. So he is the real technical brain behind what we're doing here. So I worked as an engineer and tech lead at Facebook, and then I started working in my first startup called UrbanLeap." "And with EHR integration- I'm going a bit into the weeds here- but EHR integration is a big problem in healthcare that is mostly unsolved. So, we built an agent, which we call "EHR Push," that goes into the EHR and, like a human, finds the right fields, navigates to the right places, and puts the note and everything in the EHR for the clinician. And it's working amazingly. It saves clinicians a lot of time. And that's another example of how we apply this agentic AI to solve more and more complex problems for the clinician, keep it simple, and just save as much time as we can for clinicians." #FreedAI  #AIscribes #HealthcareAI #ClinicianBurnout #HealthTech #AIinHealthcare #HealthcareAI #MedicalDocumentation #HealthcareInnovation #DigitalHealth #PhysicianWellness #HealthcareEfficiency #MedTech GetFreed.AI Download the transcript here  

Mary Kelly Jagim, principal consultant at CenTrak,  describes the role and benefits of real-time location services (RTLS) and how indoor GPS can improve facility management, patient safety, and staff morale. The use of RTLS in the development of smart hospitals helps mitigate staff burnout by reducing time-wasting tasks, such as searching for equipment, and by providing safety features like badge access and tracking.  This technology is also being used to enhance the human touch in the clinical setting by providing more accurate, real-time patient location information and updates to clinical staff and family members.   Mary explains, "So, let's say we're talking about a medium to large hospital with lots of people in the building, lots of equipment in the building, lots of things that they might be able to leverage real-time location systems for. And so those organizations are generally looking for a formal deal. They want to be able to keep track of equipment, and they want to provide a safe environment with a security solution for their staff. They might also want to look at safety around hand hygiene, so they're seeking a solution to make sure staff are washing their hands. We also might be looking at medication and other safety measures through environmental monitoring that we can provide. And then, in addition to that, they might be looking at getting into integration with their electronic health record and be able to incorporate patient flow."   "RTLS-enabled patient flow ensures they can always see the actual location of their patients. Traditionally, they're used for seeing the assigned room, but that might not actually be where the patient is at that point in time. So, we can offer things like that, and that can be a real patient experience satisfier. And then you can also help with electronic health record integration, we can help them to capture major milestone pieces. " #HealthTech #SmartHospitals #PatientSafety #HealthcareInnovation #RTLS #RealTimeLocationSystems #AIinHealthcare #PatientExperience #HealthcareEfficiency #MedicalTechnology #DigitalHealth #AI #Burnout #Safety #StaffDuress #PatientCare CenTrak.com Download the transcript here

Todd Harris, CEO and Co-Founder of Tyra Biosciences, is focused on developing a selective inhibitor for FGFR3, a protein implicated in bladder cancer and childhood dwarfism. The company has developed the SNAP discovery platform to accelerate structure-based drug design targeting this specific protein, while avoiding effects on related proteins to minimize significant side effects. Their lead drug candidate has the potential to become a primary well-tolerated oral monotherapy, shifting the treatment paradigm for cancer patients to prevent recurrence and for children to allow for more typical bone growth. Todd explains, "We are taking a novel step to a set of conditions, genetic conditions in FGFR3 biology that have long been known, that others have attempted to address, but where the underlying chemistry hasn't had the necessary selectivity to really be able to make progress. FGFR3 biology is implicated both in bladder cancer and in kids with dwarfism and short stature conditions. And there have long been chemical matter drugs that can inhibit FGFR3, but also inhibit close family members, including FGFR1 and 2. These close family members, the nature of the close family members, make it very challenging to make a drug that is a drug candidate that selectively inhibits FGFR3 while sparing FGFR1, 2, and 4."   "And it was a challenge we took on because we felt like we could meaningfully improve the outcomes for patients by doing so. FGFR3 has important biology in bone and cancer, but FGFR1 and 2 have important biology as well and can lead to side effects when inhibited at the same time as FGFR3. So our attempt to make a selective inhibitor is really an effort to minimize off-target tolerability effects, things that can affect, like pain in your nails, blistering of hands and feet, and elevated phosphate levels when taking the pan FGFR drugs. And then just focus on a drug that can inhibit FGFR3, avoid that type of toxicity, and be able to more meaningfully impact these genetic conditions." #TyraBio #TyraBiosciences #PrecisionMedicine #BladderCancer #RareDiseases #Achondroplasia #Biotechnology #DrugDevelopment #FGFR3 #Innovation #ClinicalTrials #Oncology #PediatricMedicine #StructureBasedDrugDesign tyra.bio Download the transcript here 

Peyton Fry, Founder and owner of Glass Raven, discusses the complexities of patient access to healthcare and how healthcare systems often fall into the trap of measuring efficiency in ways that are financially beneficial for providers but are detrimental to patient care. Glass Raven helps organizations define key metrics of good patient access and the implementation of technology and AI to address the defined problems. This data-driven approach focuses on the populations most likely to benefit from improved patient access to care and informs a tailored, context-aware strategy for each healthcare system. Peyton explains, "Glass Raven focuses on providing services in patient access spaces and operations for healthcare systems. We typically work with medium to large healthcare systems and help them really get a feel and eyes on their own operations and what patient access means to them. Oftentimes, that starts with just defining what patient access is for a given space and then looking into call centers, referrals, and capacity to make sure that patients who want to be scheduled can be scheduled and that healthcare systems can control costs and gather the revenue from that."   "I think patient access has been around for a long time. I think it probably falls under a lot of different umbrellas, which is part of the problem. If I started my career, I found that there just weren't many experts who focused on patient access as a discipline. I think that's because your patient access strategies will change depending on your payer mix. It'll change depending on your size and your capabilities as a system. So I think it's really hard to find the blueprint that someone else has used and move it from system to system. It's almost like you have to reinvent the wheel." #GlassRaven #HealthcareAccess #PatientExperience #HealthTech #AIinHealthcare #HealthcareOperations #DataAnalytics #HealthcareInnovation #PatientCare #HealthSystems #DigitalHealth GlassRaven.Health Download the transcript here

Dr. Tien Lee, Founder and CEO of Aardvark Therapeutics, draws a clear distinction between appetite and hunger and the implications for treating metabolic conditions and managing weight. The Aardvark lead drug candidate, an oral bitter taste receptor agonist designed to activate the gut-brain connection to turn off hunger, is showing effectiveness in treating Prader-Willi Syndrome and general obesity.  There are also signs that this drug could be effective for those using GLP-1s to avoid nausea and prevent rebound weight gain experienced after discontinuing GLP-1 drugs. Tien explains, "That difference between hunger and appetite is the central thesis for our entire company, and your brain actually regulates how much you should eat. And it's driven by both appetite and hunger. So appetites like the carrot, and hunger is like the stick. Appetite is what you feel when you really enjoy a certain food, like ice cream or cake. And the appeal and the deliciousness of that food is a reward that your brain chases. Hunger is the feeling that you get when you have fasted for a prolonged period of time, and it really bothers you, and you feel real discomfort from not eating. And then at that point, food quality matters less, and you just want to escape that negative sensation. And we believe a lot of the current drugs are good at reducing appetite, but they don't so much address hunger like what our approach is pursuing."  "In obesity, there's probably a combination of both appetite and hunger at play. And they're both important. In fact, your body has both appetite and hunger that are regulated. And when we eat food, our gut releases a number of gut hormones that help tamp down and give us satiety for both appetite and hunger. However, there are certain conditions where hunger is the predominant issue. And with the disease that is our lead indication is a condition called Prader-Willi syndrome. It's a rare genetic disorder that affects about one out of 15,000 live births. And patients with this condition have this unabated, unrelenting hunger that they feel that really starts to manifest when they're about four or seven years old. And then characteristically, patients will even feel compelled to eat garbage to the point of stomach rupture if unregulated with their food access. So it's a very debilitating condition with a lot of suffering for the patients and their families."   "There are actually quite a number of new revelations in the scientific literature, and there's a greater appreciation of gut-brain signaling. So there are actually as many neurons in your gut as there are in your spinal cord, almost as many neurons as in the cat brain. And there's a greater appreciation of a two-way communication between your brain and the gut. So the vagus nerve is the largest nerve in your body, and there's actually a two-way communication between the gut and the brain. About 80% to 90% of the signal is actually from the gut to the brain. And even the drugs that people know currently, the Ozempic and the Zepbound drugs, are working through this gut path hormone. But naturally, a lot of the signals actually come from the gut to the brain through this vagus nerve conduction." #AardvarkTherapeutics #Hunger #Appetite #PraderWilliSyndrome #PWS #Hyperphagia #RareDiseases #BiotechInnovation #ObesityTreatment #GutBrainAxis #TasteReceptors #ClinicalTrials #Therapeutics #MetabolicHealth #PharmaceuticalInnovation  aardvarktherapeutics.com Download the transcript here

Lawrence Blatt, Chairman, President, and CEO of Aligos Therapeutics,  describes the current gaps in treating the hepatitis B virus and how the disease can potentially lead to end-stage liver disease and liver cancer. Current therapies were initially developed for HIV and can suppress the virus but not eliminate or prevent the disease. The lead Aligos drug candidate blocks all steps of viral replication and prevents the virus from integrating into infected liver cells, where it can activate cancer-causing genes. Lawrence explains, "Hepatitis B virus is actually the most prevalent chronic viral infection in the world that makes patients very ill, and they can actually die from this disease. There's almost 250 million, a little bit more than 250 million people infected with Hepatitis B. And it really affects people in all walks of life across many different demographic groups. So there's not a typical HPV patient out there."   "So HBV needs to be treated for life, currently very similar to HIV, and actually HBV and HIV share common features. And early on in the HIV epidemic, patients who were treated with a class of drug called nucleoside analogs, who were also coinfected with HBV, we saw responses to those drugs. So the drugs that worked in HIV, called nucleoside or nucleotide analogs that were purposely built for HIV, worked against HBV, and they worked to a certain degree. They can suppress the virus, but they can't eliminate the virus, and they can't completely suppress all the components of the viral lifecycle that end up causing disease."   "So we're not going to affect the damage that's there initially, but we're blocking that damage from occurring. Now, one thing that's really interesting is that our livers are regenerative organs. So the liver is constantly replacing itself with new healthy hepatocytes or cells that make up the liver. And so if you could block the ongoing disease processes, the liver will have time to heal itself and eventually reverse the scarring. And that's really the only organ in our body that can regenerate. If you get scarring on your lungs or any other part of your body, that is for life. But in the liver, if you block the disease processes, you can reverse that scarring. So it's a very important and unique finding."  #AligosTherapeutics #HepatitisB #Biotechnology #DrugDevelopment #LiverHealth #ClinicalTrials #MedicalBreakthrough #PatientCare #Virology #PharmaceuticalInnovation #Vaccines Aligos.com Download the transcript here  

This roundtable on the role of AI in the biotech sector features Frank Yocca, Senior VP and Chief Scientific Officer at BioXcel Therapeutics, Joanne Taylor, Senior VP for Research at Gain Therapeutics, and Martin Brenner, CEO and Chief Scientific Officer at iBio. The conversation covers the historical adoption of AI in biotech, its current use in drug discovery, and future possibilities.  AI is not a new phenomenon in biotech and has evolved from data processing to sophisticated models that can screen vast amounts of data. There is a critical need for high-quality, structured data to train effective AI models, and these experts caution about the hype surrounding AI-generated discoveries and emphasize the need for real-world biological and human testing. Frank explains, "We are all about AI right from the get-go. We sort of inherited that from the parent company, BioXcel, which is now BioXcel, LLC. The company started by deploying data science on big biomedical and other datasets. Much of the data was unstructured and required significant curation, which at first was largely manual. Later, we began deploying more natural language processing and knowledge graphs to predict whether drugs that initially failed but were safe could be repurposed for other indications. More recently, the latest evolution has really been to use large language models and more agentic workflows to generate hypotheses and insights."   Joanne explains, "So Gain has had for many years, I think 10 years also, a virtual drug discovery platform where we've been able to screen millions of compounds virtually to discover allosteric binding molecules. But about three or so years ago, we made the change from screening millions of compounds to screening, now we're up to the capability of screening trillions of compounds." "We can screen in days, whereas it would take you months and maybe a year to do high-throughput screening. But in terms of having introduced AI into this system, it means that we can do things better because obviously, if you can screen trillions of compounds, you're screening more of the possibilities, you are going to be making better drugs. At least that's the hypothesis than if you are screening fewer compounds. So it's the fact that this is a fast tool set that makes you able to do things that you wouldn't have been otherwise able to do, but it doesn't necessarily make the process itself that much faster because you are doing much more." Martin elaborates, "So we had the good fortune to start from scratch. We're a very small company. We have made from the get-go the decision that our scientists would be bilingual. They're not only data and AI scientists, but they're also biologists. That makes it a lot easier to translate between the two disciplines. We literally started, or Rubrik Therapeutics started, on the hypothesis that would be a model of structure prediction for proteins. So the company was clearly ahead of its time, and we started by making molecules that set up better than existing ones. And that's, I think, a very low hurdle that a lot of people are doing right now. And you hear sometimes this overreaching argument, we make AI drugs. First of all, tomorrow medicines take 10,000 steps, and enabling three of them is not making an AI drug, but making better molecules. This was the first important step." #BioXcel #GainTherapeutics #iBio #AI #ClinicalAI #ArtificialIntelligence #Biotechnology #DrugDiscovery #PersonalizedMedicine #HealthcareInnovation #BiopharmaAI #ClinicalTrials #RareDisease #Neuroscience #PrecisionMedicine #HealthTech #BiotechLeadership #AIinHealthcare #DrugDevelopment #MedicalInnovation bioxceltherapeutics.com  gaintherapeutics.com  ibioinc.com Download the transcript here    

David Dodd, CEO of GeoVax,  highlights the need for next-generation vaccines, specifically multi-antigen and T cell-focused technologies, to provide better protection for immunocompromised populations. Their pipeline includes a COVID-19 vaccine candidate, an Mpox/Smallpox vaccine, and a gene therapy for solid tumors. A priority for GeoVax is to develop new manufacturing processes to significantly accelerate vaccine production, increase yield, and reduce costs. David explains, "Multi-antigen vaccines become critically important, especially for populations for whom the existing approach in vaccines, meaning single-antigen vaccines or antibody-focused or antibody-only vaccines, is inadequate. And to clarify that, there are approximately 40 million adults in the United States, about 10 times that number worldwide, who suffer from various medical conditions, such as blood cancers. They may have renal disease, diabetes, or be HIV positive. They may also have weakened immune systems, they could have multiple sclerosis or lupus. So there are a host of medical conditions that the result is they inhibit or they deplete an individual's immune system from mounting an adequate antibody response. And keep in mind, the antibody system is that first line of defense when an infectious threat occurs. And that's sort of like the frontline soldiers. They throw up a protective guard to respond to that." "That means for those individuals, what we need to do is also address this, as we develop vaccines, and some technologies allow you to do this. The majority of vaccine platforms do not, unfortunately. And that is to also induce a very strong cellular immunity or T cells. And this becomes critically important because T cells are what clear a virus from the body. It's also what drives what is known as memory, and also gives breadth or robustness of protection. So it becomes critically important that if one has the opportunity because of their technology or the platform they're utilizing to enlist and engage both the antibody as well as the cellular side, then one can generally develop a much more robust protective immune response that will reduce the risk of severe infection, hospitalization, and the risk of death against certain infections." #GeoVax #Biotech #Vaccines #PublicHealth #Healthcare #COVID19 #LifeSciences #Biotechnology #Mpox #GlobalHealth  geovax.com Download the transcript here

Rick Davis, patient advocate and Founder of AnCan, is building and operating virtual peer-to-peer support groups to allow patients to connect with others who have direct experience with their condition.  These groups can provide accurate information, foster connections among participants, and serve as a check on medical misinformation. With the growing acceptance of virtual meetings, this approach overcomes geographic, physical, and psychosocial barriers that might otherwise prevent participants from attending on-site meetings. Rick explains, "The mission is to make each person and each patient a better advocate for themselves. That's really what we try to do, and we do that through empowering patients with peer knowledge. We introduce patients to other peers who have been through what these people are facing right now, not only patients, but also their care partners, and through their experience, we hope that these patients and care partners will become more expert in managing their own situation."   "In 2007, when I was first diagnosed with stage three cancer, I attended a physical meeting, and I realized that so many people cannot attend physical meetings because one, they may have a geographical disability, they may have a physical disability, or they may have a psychosocial disability. If we only allow people to exchange views when they're physically in front of each other, it's very limiting. And so I started to look and see what existed in terms of virtual communication. And back in the day, there was very, very little. And that was the motivation that got me started."  "People come into a group, and they hear things that they just wouldn't hear otherwise. And that's why it's so valuable. It's so incredibly valuable. I mean, we had a group last night where a guy came in facing a situation, and by total coincidence, there was somebody from his own city in there who knew the docs that he'd been dealing with, understood the frustration he'd been going through, had been through it himself, and shared his experience. Well, you can't buy that."   #AnCan #AnCanSupport #VirtualSupport #CancerSupport #PeerSupport #PatientAdvocay #DigitalHealth ancan.org Download the transcript here  

Bob Farrell, CEO of mPulse, is using digital technology, data analytics and AI to improve the relationship between health plans and their members in order to improve health outcomes and operational efficiency. Bob introduces the concept of HXI, Health Experience and Insights, as a framework that unites data, intelligence, and personalized communication to provide tools to enage members at the best time and by the preferred methods with appropriate information at the right time. Analyzing claims data enables plans to identify high-risk patients, promote preventive care, and build health literacy. Bob explains, "The mission of mPulse, and this has really been the mission of the company since its founding in 2015, is to improve the health outcomes of our customers' members and patients. So we're looking to close gaps in care. We're looking to increase literacy so that members and patients can understand their health plans. So providers can take charge of healthcare and improve those outcomes. And while we're doing that, we try to help our customers improve their operational efficiencies. Most of our customers are health plans and they range from small community plans to large nationals. The 60 largest plans are our customers. We have a wide array of customers and continue to expand on that base, both with new customers and by doing more with the customers that we have."   "Health plans are not known to be the early adopters of technology. So you're right. A lot of them are still transitioning from older ways of doing things. But in general, health plans have a huge trust issue with their members, and it has really resulted from a lack of engagement, a lack of positive experience. So we see a lot of health plans looking to embrace technology to improve the member experience, make sure that those members are getting outreach. Not just now and then, but during the whole course of their consumer health journey, so that they can be aware of what things they have available to them, so that they can easily adjudicate claims and easily find providers."    #mPulse #HXI #PersonalizedCare #HealthExperienceInsights #DigitalHealth mPulse.com Download the transcript here  

Rick Pierce, Co-Founder and CEO of Decoy Therapeutics. is using AI and machine learning to accelerate drug discovery and is developing broad-acting antivirals using peptide conjugates that target a shared invasion mechanism of hundreds of viruses.  The company is using small language models and a high-speed peptide synthesizer to dramatically reduce drug creation time. Rick predicts that the future of drug discovery will combine AI-driven design with advanced biological models, such as organoids, to better predict drug toxicity and efficacy. Rick explains, "Decoy Therapeutics was founded years ago, during the COVID era. And what we've learned during that was that in order to develop drugs rapidly and scale up their manufacturing, we needed to use machine learning and AI. And the drugs that we're looking at developing today as a result of that are broad-acting antivirals that can be used against multiple viruses. So one drug can be used against multiple viruses like Flu, COVID, and RSV." "So we chose antivirals as a space because viruses have what is called polypharmacology, and in plain layman's terms, what that means is that about 250 of these viruses share the same invasion machinery, meaning the way the virus enters the healthy cells is shared across all those viruses. It's slightly different in each of those viruses, but effectively for drug development, very similar."   "That allows us to use peptides, which are also alpha helices, to be able to design drugs with AI and machine learning that physically block the invasion machinery and thus basically the virus from binding to a healthy cell. Peptides are uniquely positioned as drugs for this set of viral targets. Again, it's a rich set of targets among 250 viruses across multiple viral families."   #DecoyTherapeutics #PeptideConjugates #BroadSpectrumAntiviral #AIinBiotech #NextGenMedicine   decoytx.com Download the transcript here  

Dr. Kumar Dharmarajan, cardiologist and geriatrician and Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer at World Class Health, is  bringing concierge healthcare to employees of self-insured companies.   The platform includes a global network of top-tier doctors and nurse navigators. Directly negotiating with providers reduces costs and reduces administrative and financial friction for patients seeking planned procedures. The model also reduces friction for physicians by providing them with complete patient records and ensuring prompt payment. Kumar explains, "We are a global, medically led center of excellence platform. So, by that, we have top doctors and top hospitals around the world, including the United States and many other countries, and we help patients access that network. We have pre-negotiated rates via our nurse navigators. We really believe in the power of nurses to help patients make healthcare decisions that may be valuable and important to them. And those nurses will work with the patient before, during, and after their care episode, whether that physician they access is local, in their own communities, or somewhere else around the world. And right now, we are partnering with large self-insured companies around the world and offering our product, in addition to the network they have through their usual insurer." "We are looking for employees of self-insured large companies. Our specific target has been largely knowledge workers, so these are employees in technology, financial services, and other knowledge industries. And the reason we feel that is one, our global network may be really appealing to them because many knowledge workers come from different parts of the world, Asia, Europe, Latin America, etc. And second, our nurses and our strong concierge model, which we built with experts from Stanford and Johns Hopkins International, have created a truly white-glove experience. So not only are they high-quality, highly qualified providers, top 1% doctors, hospitals around the world, but it's also a white glove service to help patients deal with all the administrative minutiae and challenges we all experience in healthcare. And we believe that's well powered and tailored to the knowledge industry." #WorldClassHealth #SelfInsured #ConciergeCare #NurseNavigators #DigitalHealth worldclasshealth.com Download the transcript here

Brent Dial, Founder and CEO of Beek Health, has built a platform that addresses patient information fragmentation by aggregating data from patient portals and providing direct access to lab testing. Health literacy is key to preventing chronic diseases, and AI is being used to scale the delivery of personalized health information. Identifying relevant biomarkers and early warning signs supports proactive health management that can alter long-term health outcomes. Brent explains, "Beek Health is re-imagining healthcare by finally putting the individual at the center of their health journey. While we talk about patient-centric or customer-centric or shared decision-making, it's not real in practice, and it's for good and for very clear reasons. There's information asymmetry, there's information overload, and then information is quite fragmented." "Currently, we have three subscription tiers. The first option is the basic plan, which gives you platform access to synthesize and connect with multiple patient portals, as many as you have. The average individual has at least two patient portals, and it's estimated you'll see 17 different providers in your lifetime. So that's a lot of data spread out across different systems. So, one, you can sync. We have over 40,000 endpoints or provider locations where you can sync your patient portal information in one unified dashboard. All the dashboards look different."  "Second, you'll have access to labs anytime you need them. And so labs are woefully underutilized for health tracking: 70% of diagnoses are based on lab results, so you can access them anytime you need to. We partner with LabCorp, which has over 2,000 locations, and you'll receive your results within 48 hours. In addition, we're adding cost navigation, cost estimate tools, and some more fun features on our roadmap, but that just gives you basic access for a year for $99."   #BeekHealth #HealthInYourHands #OwnYourHealthData #HealthTech #DigitalHealth #PatientEmpowerment #HealthcareReimagined #ConnectedHealth #FutureOfHealth beekhealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Asher Eghbali, Co-Founder of Fuerte, has developed a platform to address the significant communication challenges between healthcare providers and pharmaceutical industry representatives. The goal is to streamline this relationship by replacing inefficient scheduling methods, and eliminate miscommunication and missed meetings to reduce frustrations and wasted time. The app is designed to combine professional networking with social media elements, including user profiles and notifications, to help build stronger, long-lasting professional relationships that benefit everyone involved. Asher explains, "Within the life science companies and pharmaceutical reps, as we know, they're working very hard to commercialize medications and new drugs, new therapies that come out there that they want to get into patients' hands. But sometimes they have a very hard time scheduling and putting in time to go to the doctor's office. Traditionally, they conduct a lunch-and-learn session or a coffee consult, where they come on-site to a doctor's office or a hospital setting."   "Right now, to schedule that appointment, it's being done where the medical assistant or the office manager is writing down that individual's name on some kind of paper calendar, at most, maybe some kind of Google sheet, or a Google Meet account that they have within the office section. And that's the way that they're scheduling it. Healthcare reps are sometimes cold walking in, sometimes they're cold calling. They're putting in a lot of effort. They're working very hard to figure out how to get in and educate providers and their staff on new advancements." "What Fuerte hopes to do with a streamlined communication platform is make it very easy for the providers to find the reps and the reps to find providers to keep in touch with each other, to search each other by disease state, by therapeutic drug, by medical advancement, and to have a shared calendar system that they can keep in constant communication and contact." fuerteapp.com Download the transcript here

Scott Pescatore, Executive VP of the Rare Diseases Business at Recordati, is focused on rare and ultra-orphan diseases with high unmet needs by acquiring promising compounds from other companies and advancing them through development and approval. An example is the company's drug Isturisa, acquired from Novartis, which is an FDA-approved effective treatment for patients with Cushing syndrome, a rare endocrine condition. Raising awareness of rare diseases among physicians, patients, and the general public is a priority for Recordati to improve diagnosis rates and clinical trial participation, and to encourage more research and funding in the rare disease space. Scott explains, "We have two primary divisions at Recordati. One is our specialty primary care business, and the other is the rare disease business, which I have the honor and privilege to look after. And we have a very simple sort of work ethic or business mantra, if you will, and that's focused on the few. And we really dedicate ourselves to focusing on disease areas and patient groups and therapeutic areas that have a high unmet need and really low or limited options for patients. And really focusing on diseases and areas that are rare and considered ultra-orphan by the definitions in the US, where really there's a very small patient base. And that's where we began back in 2007, when the rare disease business was formed. And that's really what our focus has been since then. And we continue to focus on this segment of the market." "So Isturisa is really a fantastic product. We acquired this product through a deal we did with Novartis Pharmaceuticals back in 2019, and this product has FDA approval for patients who have endogenous hypercortisolemia with Cushing syndrome. So it's quite a nasty disease, but it's a very efficacious product. The product is what's considered a cortisol inhibitor in the blocks in a particular enzyme to help normalize hypercortisolemia in patients with Cushing syndrome. And Cushing syndrome, for those who aren't familiar, is a rare endocrine condition that really has a significant impact on patients' quality of life, on the caregivers, on the families. And the indication I mentioned was supported by quite robust phase 3 trials."  #Recordati #RareDisease #FocusedontheFew #CushingSyndrome #IMCD #CastlemansDisease recordati.com Download the transcript here  

Martin Burns, CEO of Bruin Biometrics, is focused on preventing pressure injuries, which are often not detected through visual and tactile assessments because damage starts invisibly under the skin. The Bruin scanner technology identifies pressure injuries by measuring sub-epidermal moisture, which can predict later tissue death, highlighting the condition that can be treated before it develops further. This handheld device is skin tone agnostic, addressing a significant health disparity and providing an objective number indicating the presence of excess fluid, allowing clinicians to act quickly. Martin explains, "They are surprisingly common, and I emphasize surprisingly because pressure injuries are typically not talked about in the mainstream, but actually they affect about three to three and a half million patients a year in the US. And really shockingly, of those three to three and a half million, about 60,000 people die from them every year. So think about that as in the list of the top 10 leading causes of mortality in the United States, which is the surprising part. When you speak to friends and relatives, they've often heard of them potentially as bedsores, but nobody really has an appreciation of just how significant they are. How widespread or how deadly."   "The initial stages of it are imperceptible to any practitioner, but are actually measurable by objective technologies, and they don't become visibly manifest or physically manifest until much later. And what happens is they end up breaking the skin surface. As you can imagine, every time the skin is broken is an opening for infections and significant complications, which actually is the thing that ends up causing huge amounts of additional lengths of stay and costly treatments. And to the extent that those don't work, mortality." "Thankfully, our scanner is one in which the mechanism it uses disregards skin tone entirely. In other words, skin color doesn't matter for the scanner. What we are measuring is an increase or a decrease in fluid at the specific site that we're measuring. And so it's skin tone agnostic, which is rather brilliant because dark skin tone patients die at a rate four times more than any other cohort, which is an absolute travesty and one in which it simply doesn't need to happen. And our scanner is a leading reason why it doesn't need to happen." #BruinBiometrics #Prevention #PressureInjuries #HospitalSafety #PressureInjuryPrevention #PatientSafety #Hospitals bruinbiometrics.com Download the transcript here

Robert Jacks, President and CEO of Sparrow Pharmaceuticals, identifies that an elevated cortisol level is a newly recognized cause of treatment-resistant type 2 diabetes. A significant portion of patients with diabetes who do not respond to standard treatments, including GLP-1 agonists, have underlying high cortisol. Sparrow has developed a drug designed to lower cortisol levels inside cells, directly addressing the underlying driver of the disease, and to be used as a complement to existing treatments. This concept of targeting cortisol-driven resistance could be extended to other conditions, such as treatment-resistant hypertension. Robert explains, "I feel as though Sparrow has come full circle, actually, with the mechanism of our drug. Originally, we have a drug that targets HSD-1. We can talk about what that is, but it's involved in intracellular cortisol regulation. This was a class of drugs that was originally developed targeting cardiometabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes. And the drugs had some moderate efficacy, but they weren't well differentiated in a broad population and largely were just discontinued for commercial reasons." "Our company was founded a number of years ago based on the idea that these drugs had real potential but hadn't been used in the right patient population. And that being the patient population with the disease that we know is driven by excess cortisol toxicity, because that's aligned with the mechanism, as I was mentioning. So we generated some really interesting data in a rare disease called Endogenous Cushing syndrome. This is a very severe orphan disease with patients who have very severely elevated cortisol, showing in fact that yes, this mechanism does seem like it could have a very major impact in the right patient population." "Simultaneously, another company published some data showing that actually there's a very large population of people with treatment-resistant type 2 diabetes, a very high level of medical need, and that their underlying disease actually is being driven by elevated levels of cortisol. And so when you bring together the data that we generated and what appears to be a large amount needed in a large population, it seems like we may have the perfect solution for that. So we've refocused our efforts on a broad population of treatment-resistant type 2 diabetes in patients whose disease is being impacted or driven by elevated cortisol levels."  #SparrowPharmaceuticals #Type2Diabetes #CardiometabolicDisease #CortisolRegulation #Cortisol #GLP1 #RareDisease sparrowpharma.com Download the transcript here

Jesse Levey, CEO and Founder of Longevity Health, has a focus on extending the health span not just the lifespan of more people by providing access to tools and preventative health information. Lessons learned from expensive concierge medical services are being applied to a broader population, driving down health costs and democratizing longevity medicine. Using AI to build a scalable and personalized approach to wellness not just sick care, Longevity Health aims to make an AI doctor available around the globe.  Jesse explains, "Our mission is to help a billion people live to a hundred in good health. That's the vision. And the way that we get there is by building an AI doctor trains of ed on longevity medicine and distributed around the world. We have a three-phased business model. Phase one is to take the sort of hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year longevity concierge experience and deliver it for $10,000. So we've taken this really high-end experience that combines an executive physical with a longevity concierge physician and a team to help you implement the recommendations. And we've delivered that for $10,000. That's been around for about two years."  "Phase two takes that down to $1,000 with the help of AI. So it reduces the time spent by humans and the need to spend a lot of time with clinicians. And so it's a mix between clinician time and AI interactions. And then eventually, as the regulation allows and as the technology improves, we believe that we'll be able to deliver this experience for as low as $10 a month or $100 a year via an AI doctor. And so that's the future. That's what we're building towards." #LongevityHealth #Longevity #HealthyAging #HealthSpan #FunctionalMedicine #HealthAI #Aging longevityhealth.me Download the transcript here