Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Gabriel Brooks, Chief Medical Officer at Solid Biosciences, is a precision molecular genetic medicines company focused on rare cardiovascular and neuromuscular diseases with an initial focus on Friedreich's ataxia. Currently, there are very limited treatments for this rare, progressive neurologic disease caused by a genetic deficiency. Solid Biowsciences' novel gene therapy uses dual-route administration to deliver directly to the heart and brain and to replace the missing frataxin gene, which is critical for energy production. Gabriel explains, "Our flagship program is our DMD program, where we have two clinical trials, a first-in-human INSPIRE study, and a double-blind randomized placebo-controlled phase three trial for the SGT-003 DMD medicine. And for Friedreich's ataxia, we have the SGT-212 program, which uses a novel dual route of administration to target not only the cardiomyopathy, but also uses direct injection into the dentate nucleus. We're trying to address the central pathophysiology of the ataxia that patients live with every day." "So Friedrich's ataxia is a rare and devastating neurologic disease that afflicts around 5,000 patients in the United States and much more actually in Europe. There is a genetic predisposition. And Friedrich's ataxia is really a disease where the patients experience difficulty in moving, what's called ataxia, which you could think of as poor coordination, where when they try to move, their brain is sending a signal to their muscles, let's say to grab that cup of coffee or climb the stairs." "In fact, there are specific neurologic tests in terms of looking at nerve conduction and other things that can make the formal diagnosis. And certainly, we can get there with genetic testing. And what you're picking up on is absolutely something that's important with rare disease, is that oftentimes there's a lag between when a patient first manifests symptoms and when they ultimately have the diagnosis. In Friedrich's ataxia, like other genetic diseases, it is horrible. And so, for patients who do make the diagnosis of Friedreich's ataxia, there is often what we call cascade screening, where we look for the disease gene in relatives. Oftentimes, it's then that siblings are identified, and eventually they start manifesting the disease as well." #SolidBiosciences #GeneTherapy #GeneTherapyResearch #RareDiseases #FriedreichsAtaxia #PrecisionMedicine #Neurology #Cardiology #ClinicalTrials #MedicalInnovation #HealthcareInnovation #SolidBiosciences solidbio.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Payam Zamani, Founder and CEO of MY DR NOW, is directly solving the challenge of access to healthcare by creating a hybrid model that includes convenient walk-in clinics with extended hours, house calls, and virtual visits. This approach is consistent with modern on-demand expectations and attracting patients in dense urban areas as well as rural communities. Patient acquisition is driven by word-of-mouth and relationships with payers and hospital systems, to improve outcomes and reduce hospital readmissions. The model is also attractive to physicians by minimizing administrative tasks and flexible scheduling, leading to less burnout and higher retention. Payam explains, "The big issue with healthcare, as we've seen it and that MY DR NOW has taken on, one of the most challenging issues of healthcare is accessibility. For far too long, there's been this discrepancy between what we believe and what we know as healthcare practitioners to be important versus reality, versus what actually happens. We have a tendency to focus on all the right things and give patients all the right instructions and directions, as far as focusing on prevention, cancer screenings, and annual wellness visits. And we tell them to manage their chronic conditions because it's important, and to take their medications. But in reality, what ends up happening is that patients have to take time off work just to be able to see their healthcare provider. They have to wait weeks or, in many instances, months in advance just to be able to get in to see someone." "What MY DR NOW really set out to solve is how to deliver healthcare services in a manner that's more consistent with our daily lives, with what our expectations are. In a manner that makes more sense for working people, for working families, for moms and kids and for parents, and in a way that delivers better outcomes. And that's MY DR NOW in a nutshell." "Well, along those same lines of accessibility and convenience, what we set out to do was first of all, build an omnichannel network. And what that means is having multiple modalities by which you can obtain healthcare services. So there are clinics, and we like to make sure that those clinics are ubiquitous, and we can expand on that here in a little bit. But we have clinics that are open seven days a week. They're open early and late, on weekends and holidays. They're open when you expect them and need them to be open. But more importantly, you can not only schedule an appointment for those clinics, but also walk in whenever you want. And just as importantly, you can walk in for anything you go to your family medicine office for. So it's not an urgent care where you're only going in for acute and episodic issues." #MYDRNOW #HealthcareInnovation #PrimaryCare #PatientCentered #HealthcareAccessibility #DigitalHealth #ValueBasedCare #HealthTech #PhysicianWellbeing #HealthcareDelivery #MedicalInnovation #AccessToCare #HealthcareInnovation #OmnichannelCare #HealthcareTransformation mydrnow.com Download the transcript here

Tom Kim, Chief Medical Officer at Sound Long-Term Care Management, discusses the role of accountable care organizations, ACOs, in improving healthcare for the long-term care population. The unique complexities and challenges of these patients include multiple medical conditions, frequent hospitalizations, and fragmented care. By using predictive analytics, telemedicine, and value-based care principles to deliver more coordinated care, patients are avoiding hospitalizations, receiving higher-quality care, and experiencing reduced costs. Tom explains, "So, in essence, an accountable care organization (ACO) is a group of healthcare providers that come together with a commitment to Medicare to improve the quality of care for the Medicare beneficiaries they serve and to decrease the cost of care for that population. And it's a way to really better coordinate care for those residents or for those Medicare beneficiaries to really receive the best outcome possible." "Yes, so in the fee-for-service world, there is a lot of focus, at least from a provider standpoint, on volume. So you're really focused on seeing as many patients as you can. In a value-based care model, we're really moving away from the volume model toward one focused more on quality. So, instead of being rewarded for high volume, you're being rewarded as a provider for the quality of care you provide. And not only is this beneficial to the provider, but it's also beneficial to the patients. So, there's having more time with their provider, receiving better care, and hopefully avoiding unnecessary or avoidable care. And so it's really a win across the board, from both a provider and a patient standpoint." "Our patient population tends to be more complex with more medical problems. They tend to be hospitalized more often. They tend to rely on others to make healthcare decisions and closer to the end of life. And so, care is really different from those who are still living at home and in the community. And on top of that, in terms of the long-term care space, and why it's so challenging is that you just kind of mentioned it a little bit, is that the population is aging." #SLTCM #ACO #AccountableCareOrganizations #AccountableCare #LongTermCare #ValueBasedCare #HealthcareInnovation #Telemedicine #SeniorCare #HealthcareLeadership #PatientCare #HealthTech #Medicare sltcm.soundphysicians.com Download the transcript here

Lisa Israelovitch, Co-Founder and CEO of AssistIQ, is addressing the challenges in healthcare supply chain management caused by a lack of accurate data on supplies used across the care facility, which leads to operational inefficiencies and financial losses. The previous methods of tracking have often been manual and unreliable, involving product stickers, barcode readers, and manual data entry. Using computer vision and AI to automatically see, track, and document every product used is improving data accuracy, saving clinicians' time, enabling inventory tracking and product expiration management, and delivering significant financial benefits. Lisa explains, "What really took us from building this inside one hospital to a market solution was spending time across dozens of systems in the US and Canadian landscape. And we found that three things were predominantly happening. Either there was a lot of manual entry searching and typing into the electronic health record system, such as Epic, or others. Often, barcode scanners worked only a portion of the time when the product was in the hospital's ERP system, but they often weren't. And so the barcode scanners only worked for a portion of the time. And then, honestly, the thing we saw a bunch of was nurses with product stickers on their sleeves, and they would basically post those stickers on paper. And so it was really a combination of waste to try to get to that documentation." "So everything from implants to staplers to glue and things are typically hundreds to thousands of dollars. And just the accuracy was simply not there. In most hospital operating rooms, it's a huge revenue center in US hospitals, but for all markets, it's a huge cost center in terms of just the supply chain in general across the system, which is the largest cost category that the health team has after wages from their labor. And the OR, it's often the leading cost factor. So the supplies can be pretty expensive, as you said." "The key became really figuring out how we could automate that work so that the clinicians, the nurses, the technicians were truly focused on the patient. Focused on assisting the physician for the case and making sure that they weren't having to do any of this extra sort of administrative work. Ultimately, it is their responsibility to document what gets used, but it has to be much more automated to get to that level of data accuracy and quality." #AssistIQ #HealthcareAI #ClinicalSupplyIntelligence #HealthTech #HospitalOperations#SurgicalIntelligence #SupplyChainInnovation #HealthcareSupplyChain #HealthTech #PatientSafety #DigitalTransformation #HealthcareInnovation #AI #ComputerVision #OperatingRoom #HealthcareLeadership #QualityImprovement #CostReduction AssistIQ.ai Download the transcript here

Ronen Eckhouse, Co-Founder and CEO of Rapid Medical, identifies the limitations of current stroke treatments, which are primarily effective for large vessel occlusions. The Rapid Medical TIGERTRIEVER device is designed to safely and effectively treat strokes and remove clots in smaller vessels deeper in the brain. The unique adjustability of the device allows physicians to control the size and force during a procedure, allowing for precise and safer clot removal in complex anatomies. Ronen explains, "So the quicker or the less time there is between the stroke and the ability to open the occlusions and resupply the brain with oxygen, the better. There are two types of treatments. One is a drug called TPA. It's a clot buster, and that can be administered up to four and a half hours. And then there's what's called thrombectomy, which is basically using a catheter to get to the clot and then removing the clot with a catheter or stent, kind of in mechanical terms. But today, that's only applicable to what's for the bigger arteries in the brain, what's called large vessel occlusions. And these account for about 15% or 20% of the population. So there are good solutions, but they are limited in when they can be used." "That's exactly where we come in. The reason it's difficult to treat these kinds of smaller vessels in the brain, or what we call the medium-vessel occlusion, is that the deeper you go into the brain, on the one hand, the complexity of the procedure increases. So the vessels are a little bit more fragile. There are more turns and tortuosity. So getting to the clot is a little bit harder, and pulling it out as well." "At the same time, the benefit is a little bit smaller. So now we're not saving half of the brain. Maybe we're saving 30% of the brain, which is still very significant, but the benefit is a little bit smaller. So the risk-benefit ratio, which is critical and everything we do in medicine, changes when you're going deeper into the brain. And as a result, you need new tools." #RapidMedical #DMVO #MeVO #Stroke #StrokeCare #Neurology #MedTech #DISTALS #Neurovascular #MedicalDevices #HealthcareInnovation #Thrombectomy #PatientCare #MedicalTechnology #StrokeAwareness #HealthcareProfessionals rapid-medical.com Download the transcript here

Robert Schickel, Chief Executive Officer at NUAgo Therapeutics, is developing a cancer therapy using short RNAs to target and disrupt interconnected survival genes in cancer cells. The therapy has been shown to be non-toxic to healthy cells, which have high levels of microRNAs, whereas cancer cells downregulate microRNAs to become metastatic. This is a systems-biology therapeutic approach that targets the entire survival network of a cell, making it independent of specific mutations or pathways and potentially applicable to the vast majority of solid tumors. Robert explains, "NUAgo is a technology company. We are developing what we define as short RNAs, and these are going to be cancer therapies that really target the survival system of a cancer. This survival system keeps the cancer alive. And instead of going after single components, pathways, or mutations as targeted therapies do, we're using short RNAs to reduce the expression of multiple essential survival genes. And when you get enough of these genes disrupted, the cancer cells can no longer maintain the system that keeps them alive. And at that point, the cell will activate a death response that eliminates the cancer cell by activating several cell death pathways simultaneously. So this is really a unique area in science, and we're developing this. It's a new modality. You see a lot of promise of this in the solid tumor patients." "The platform that we're building has the potential to go across solid tumor markets. The recent IP that we're filing is for the 11 largest tumor markets from breast and lung, kidney, liver, and all the way down to the smaller, more lethal cancers in pancreas, ovarian, and other small cancers as well. So right now we think we can apply this to about 85% or 90% of the market." "What we're doing is we take a step back. We're in fundamental biology. So this mechanism really goes back almost a billion years. I mean, fungi have the same mechanism. And so when we go after what are called survival genes, and they are essential for the survival of a cell, they deal with all kinds of cellular functions." #NUAgoTherapeutics #CancerResearch #Oncology #Biotechnology #PrecisionMedicine #RNATherapeutics #SystemsBiology #MedicalInnovation #HealthcareBreakthrough #CancerTreatment #SurvivalGenes #BiopharmaDevelopment NUAgotherapeutics.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Babak Saboury, Chief Scientific and Innovation Officer and Physician Founder of United Theranostics, discusses the emergence of nuclear oncology as the fourth pillar of cancer care. United Theranostics is combining advanced molecular imaging and radiopharmaceutical therapies to identify a cancer cell's unique fingerprint and then delivering targeted radiation, reducing side effects by sparing healthy cells. Molecular imaging can serve as a unifying map for guiding a collaborative, multimodal approach to treating a range of cancers. Babak explains, "I can just very quickly tell you that there are four pillars of treating cancer. Traditionally, when we approached cancer, we wanted to cut it out. That was surgical oncology. Whatever could not be cut out was treated by giving a medication. That was medical oncology. After a while, there was just a modality to the things that were difficult to cut out, but that was a localized hit from outside. That was the radiation oncology. And right now, we are at the beginning of a new horizon. You treat patients systemically, which means all the lesions everywhere. However, you are really there, a magical radiopharmaceutical that goes to find the cell and kills it by radiation. That's a nuclear oncology. So nuclear oncology is the fourth pillar of cancer care." "So you can imagine that in the past we tried to attack cancer cells. We didn't know what shape they had, which proteins were expressed, or what their characteristics were. So we kind of went blindly and tried to attack them. Imagine that we have a way to find a fingerprint of those cells and go there first to find that fingerprint. And if the fingerprint exists, then go after those cells as a targeted attack. That is where molecular imaging and radiopharmaceutical therapy come into play. So molecular imaging profiles the cancer cells to see what their fingerprint is and whether a certain fingerprint exists. Radiopharmaceutical therapy uses this information to target just those cells and not other cells. And that is the principle of Theranostics, which is a combination of diagnostics and therapeutics, finding and then destroying in a very precise manner." #UnitedTheranostics #NuclearOncology #PrecisionMedicine #Radiopharmaceuticals #CancerCare #MolecularImaging #Theranostics #OncologyInnovation #PatientCare #HealthcareInnovation #CancerTreatment Unitedtheranostics.com Download the transcript here

Shaun Bagai, CEO of RenovoRx, has designed a drug-delivery platform to treat hard-to-reach chemo-resistant tumors such as pancreatic cancer by delivering chemotherapy directly to the tumor site. The RenovoCath device increases the drug concentration in the tumor while significantly reducing systemic toxicities and side effects. The technology is not intended to replace the traditional approach using systemic chemotherapy and radiation, but to achieve better results in tumors with low blood supply that prevent drugs from reaching their target in sufficient concentrations. Shaun explains, "Generally, when we think about oncology therapies, it's really trying to balance the detriment to the patients with the toxicities and hopefully keep the tumor at bay or kill the tumor such that patients live longer. And unfortunately, we often forget about the patient and hyper-focus on the disease. And the challenge we've taken on is, can we take both into account and actually treat both the patient and the disease by limiting systemic toxicities and effects, and then trying to improve survival by keeping the tumors at bay." "So, when we look at certain tumors in the body, like pancreatic tumors, for example, they don't have a high level of blood supply. Generally, when we think about tumors, we think of balls of blood vessels with tumor cells, and of tumors such as pancreatic tumors. They don't have large tumor feeder vessels that end in a tumor. And what this does is create a level of chemo resistance because the blood can't carry the chemotherapy forward. And what we've developed with TAMP is a mechanism where we push the drug across the wall of a blood vessel to saturate and bathe the tumor in chemotherapy, such that we get almost a hundredfold increase in tissue concentration compared to if you just gave it systemically throughout the entire body." #RenovoRx #OncologyInnovation #DrugDelivery #CancerCare #MedicalDevices #PancreaticCancer #ClinicalTrials #PatientCare #Interventionalradiology #Oncology #MedicalTechnology #TAMP #Chemotherapy #CancerTreatment #HealthcareInnovatio#TargetedOncology #InnovativeCancerTherapies #PancreaticCancerAwareness #PrecisionOncology RenovoRx.com Download the transcript here

Suzy Jackson, a digital health specialist focusing on Patient Tech, highlights the shift in the pharmaceutical industry from a provider-focused model to direct engagement with patients. Using AI to create a more consumer-like, personalized healthcare experience will benefit patients and inform researchers and providers about adherence to care and drug side effects. Patient Tech helps reach underserved populations and moves from providing information to a proactive environment, enabling action and more informed discussions with healthcare providers. Suzy explains, "So everything for me in the Patient Tech space is anything that helps a patient find care, navigate care options, or indeed stay on care, including anything to do with lifestyle interventions and preventative care as well. So I think the category is expanding very, very rapidly, and I'm excited to see what will go on in the next few years." "Well, I think it's pretty safe to say that this is a new venture for the pharmaceutical industry as a whole. I think traditionally, a lot of time has been spent on ACP education and thinking about how we make HCPs aware of all the choices and therapeutic interventions that are available for their patients. But in the last couple of years, we've really seen a shift, and I think that's caused by a multitude of different factors I'm sure we can speak about, but there's really been a shift to standing on the frontline with patients for pharma and making sure that they're providing patients with care that otherwise patients are going to find in other spaces." #PatientTech #DigitalHealth #AI #HealthcareInnovation #PatientCenteredCare #HealthEquity #PharmaTech #HealthTech #PatientExperience #WomenInHealth #HealthInnovation #AIinHealthcare #HealthcareLeadership #FutureOfHealth #Lifesciences #PharmaDTP suzy-jackson.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Robert Rifkin, medical oncologist and hematologist at the University of Colorado in Steamboat Springs. He was also a clinical investigator in the trial that led to the approval of BLENREP, a multiple myeloma drug from GSK. Multiple myeloma is the second most common blood cancer, and while the prognosis has dramatically improved, BLENREP is a novel treatment for patients whose disease has relapsed after other therapies. It is the first drug antibody conjugate approved for relapsed multiple myeloma, targeting the BCMA antigen, which is present on nearly all myeloma cells. Robert explains, "This is a condition that is really what I would call a disease of the Medicare population. So the median age of diagnosis is often early 60s, but occasionally you do see the younger patients with more aggressive disease. It's thought that African Americans who contract myeloma also may have a more virulent form of the disease." "Right now we live in a great day and age where we have a tremendous number of good treatments, both upfront, which we really won't be discussing today. And then in patients that have unfortunately relapsed and failed other lines of therapy, that's where the exciting new drug BLENREP comes into play. It's going to have a very specific slot in the myeloma armamentarium." "So BLENREP is unique in that it targets something on the myeloma cells called the BCMA target or B-cell maturation antigen target. That's expressed in 98% of patients with myeloma. So it provides a really great target to shoot at, if you will. Right now, we really have sort of three main classes of therapy to go after it: CAR T-cells and bispecific antibodies that your audience will likely be familiar with. This one is unique in that it's the first drug antibody conjugate approved to treat myeloma. So it's not a cellular therapy, but instead it's a molecule that has the BCMA that binds to the myeloma cells, and then it unloads a payload to kill the myeloma cells. So that's nice. You don't have to go to a huge center with experience in cellular therapies. It can be done readily in the community." #MultipleMyeloma #Oncology #BLENREP #BloodCancer #Belamaf #CancerResearch #Hematology #ClinicalTrials #PrecisionMedicine #CancerTreatment #MedicalAdvancement blenrephcp.com Download the transcript here

Haresh Patel, Founder of Diagnostic MD AI, discusses the transformative potential of AI in healthcare diagnostics, particularly for patients with chronic or complex issues. Based on his own struggle to get an accurate diagnosis of an autoimmune condition, Haresh has developed a patient-centric platform where individuals can build their complete health story, integrating modern and functional medicine with a more holistic approach, which AI analyzes to help doctors connect disparate symptoms, ask the right questions, identify patterns, and reach the correct diagnosis faster while reducing human bias. Haresh talks about his own journey in his book The Ghost in My Body, where he emphasizes the need to identify the root cause of disease and to understand the patient narrative over time. Haresh explains, "Sometimes that story has to come together in different ways because sometimes the patient doesn't want to share it or doesn't remember. But if we can get the whole story, then we're going to have a much better chance. AI is going to open up the world of possibilities. And I immediately went into high gear because that's exactly what I did with the prior company that I sold to State Street Bank. It was a FinTech platform, but we had FinTech investors put together all of their fragmented data, create a visualization so they could actually see patterns." "In the medical world, we're a machine too, but the difference is we had a symptom, which is a scenario. And so I all of a sudden thought, wow, I can solve this problem with AI, and if I can help solve one person's problem, my 12 years of suffering while I was building this company will all be worth it. So that's kind of a quick overview about how this all came together. Had I not had any of the experiences of my medical journey or my own journey in the FinTech world, and how I connected the dots, maybe this idea might not have sparked with me. Maybe somebody else would've gotten that spark." #EmpoweredPatient #HealthcareInnovation #AutoimmuneAwareness #PatientAdvocacy #HealthTech #ChronicIllnessJourney #MedicalMystery #PatientEmpowerment #TechForGood#HolisticHealth#AIDiagnostics #DigitalHealth #PatientCare #MedicalInnovation #HealthcareAI #IntegrativeMedicine #HealthTechnology #MedicalDiagnostics Hareshpatel.ai Download the transcript here

Ben Scharfe, Executive VP of AI at Altera Digital Health, addresses the evolving regulatory landscape for AI in healthcare, emphasizing AI developers' primary responsibility to ensure transparency so clinicians can understand and verify AI-generated outputs. AI is positioned to be a supportive tool for providers, not as an autonomous decision-maker, with emerging regulations beginning to codify the human-in-the-loop requirement. Ben warns of setting higher standards for AI than physicians and automation complacency, in which clinicians might over-rely on AI. Ben explains, "Altera provides electronic health records predominantly as well as interoperability solutions for hospitals, health systems, and ambulatory systems. We predominantly serve the US, but we're also present in Canada, in Europe, and in the Asia Pacific region. So we have a global presence, but we do a lot of our work in the US." "I think the regulatory landscape around the division of responsibilities is really something that is evolving. And so last year, at one point, there was a proposed federal moratorium on state-level legislation, with little, I would say, federal regulation to counterbalance." "Maybe fortunately, it didn't pass, but since then, there's been a patchwork of state regulation. So I'd say the responsibilities are not entirely defined because they vary by state, and some of those regulations are somewhat contradictory. But recently, the FDA did put out some new guidance and essentially where the responsibility lies for builders. I'd say the primary responsibility is around transparency and enabling clinicians and care providers to understand the reasoning behind any output from an AI system. To be able to review the citations, the evidence used, and the data points the AI may have ingested or consulted in creating some sort of output, so the provider can still have ownership of the care. And essentially, I'd say the core theme there is not having AI that is really acting autonomously on a patient, but rather AI that supports providers who know what they're doing and are licensed." #AlteraDigitalHealth #HealthcareAI #ClinicalAI #DigitalHealth #HealthTech #AIRegulation #PatientSafety #HealthcareInnovation #MedicalTechnology #AIInMedicine #HealthcareLeadership Alterahealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. John Birkmeyer, President of the medical group at Sound Physicians, defines value-based care as an evolution from older managed care models, with closer alignment of incentives for quality of care and cost-effectiveness. Working within the hospital environment, this approach emphasizes standardizing patient-centered care and communication across multiple hospital departments, reducing redundant tests and improving patient outcomes. The use of AI is one way to reduce the administrative burden on physicians, freeing up more time for patient care, a departure from earlier technologies that added to clinicians' workload. John explains, "Sound Physicians is a multi-specialty medical group. It's distinguished in a couple of ways from a lot of the physician groups that your listeners and patients are used to. Number one, it focuses exclusively on specialties that are practiced inside the hospital. So in that context, we work in anesthesia, in the ICU, in hospital medicine, and in the emergency department. And we're different to the extent that we're a very large group. So we're in our 25th year of operations, but we currently run over 400 practices in about the same number of hospitals across most of the states of the US. So in that context, we've learned a lot about what care looks like in different parts of the United States, what things are similar, what things are different, and most importantly, what things work." "Some of the most important strategies for succeeding with value-based care are things that are very aligned with ensuring not just high quality, but high empathy care to patients. And most importantly, making sure that clinical decisions physicians make in partnership with their patients account for not just scientific evidence but also the values and preferences of patients and their families. More often than not, there's no single right answer for what that patient needs in terms of tests or procedures or other types of care that occur in the hospital. And many of them involve trade-offs between quality of life and length of life, how patients feel about being in the hospital and for how long, how they feel about risk, and what they want to do when they're ultimately discharged from the hospital." #SoundPhysicians #ValueBasedCare #HospitalMedicine #HealthcareInnovation #PatientCare #HealthTech #MedicalGroup #QualityImprovement #HealthcareleaderShip #PhysicianLife #HospitalAdministration soundphysicians.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Jim Berenson, Founder of the Institute for Myeloma & Bone Cancer Research and the Berenson Cancer Center, describes the Institute's work, which includes maintaining a large biobank of patient samples that support both its own research and that being conducted by external groups. This biobank is being used to develop new blood markers for faster disease diagnosis, to assess treatment efficacy, and to support drug development for multiple myeloma and other cancers. Real-time monitoring of patient symptoms with a mobile app is capturing critical, often-missed patient data and providing evidence of clinical trial success. Jim explains, "Myeloma is a bone marrow-based cancer of a type of white cell called a plasma cell. These cells normally make a type of protein antibody that helps us fend off infections. And what happens in myeloma is that one of these types of cells goes rogue and takes over the bone marrow. As a result, these patients make lots and lots of only one type of antibody, and that protein becomes our tumor marker. They can get into trouble with their kidneys, their blood counts, their bones, and their immune system because they can become very compromised both by the disease and the treatment. Therefore, patients can develop frequent infections." "It's diagnosed mainly through blood work, bone marrow examination, and radiologic tests. The latter used to be X-rays, but today it is MRI, CT, or PET scans. The bone marrow test usually demonstrates too many plasma cells that are clonal, meaning they are all of one type. So, usually, the bone marrow plasma cells make up only one-half percent. Myeloma patients have no less than 10% and up to 99% plasma cells, and they are all of one type. They all make one antibody because normally one plasma cell makes one antibody, but this is a clone that's grown a lot in the bone marrow. So, because the bone marrow directly releases proteins into the blood, there's a lot of the myeloma cell-produced antibody in the blood and/or the urine of these patients." "We now have nearly 60,000 bone marrow and blood specimens collected over the last 25 years from our patients, and we collect them in a way that's very systematic. So we obtain blood weekly in the first month, and bone marrow when they undergo the procedure. And then after the first month, the blood is drawn and obtained for research and for the Biobank about every month. And this is a huge resource for not only our own research, which has uncovered two new blood biomarkers through the use of these samples. And we are also able to use the Biobank as a resource for other research groups and companies, whether biotech, pharma, or in vitro diagnostics, to see if they can find a new marker. So we send them a sample, and they can use it for their work." #IMBCR #MultipleMyeloma #HematologyOncology #PrecisionMedicine #PatientMonitoring #DigitalHealth #CancerResearch #Biomarkers #PersonalizedTreatment #QualityOfLife #MedicalInnovation IMBCR.org Download the transcript here

Tom Looby, CEO of Conavi, is focused on developing hybrid intravascular imaging technology that combines two established modalities into a single imaging catheter to provide a comprehensive view of the coronary arteries. This eliminates blind spots when using either intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) or optical coherence tomography (OCT) alone and is driving a shift away from relying solely on traditional angiography toward the use of advanced intravascular imaging to guide coronary procedures. Using AI to analyze dual-stream co-registered data allows interventional cardiologists to more accurately assess lesions, determine the appropriate stent size, and ensure proper placement, thereby reducing cardiac death and blood clots around stents. Tim explains, "So our technology is an imaging catheter. We're unique in that we combine two imaging modalities that are already well established in the market. But because each of them has blind spots, by combining them into a single catheter, we remove those blind spots, and we think we produce the best imaging catheter to help guide coronary interventions." "It is well known that these strengths and weaknesses occur in both ultrasound and optical imaging. But to set the stage, this is a trend happening in the marketplace. There are four million angioplasty stenting procedures performed each year, and most of them rely solely on traditional angiography. Most of your audience probably knows that angiography is an X-ray that uses a contrast agent, so you're seeing the vasculature around the heart through a secondary image. The detailed view inside the blood vessels is limited when using only angiography, which has restricted the types of procedures doctors have been able to perform over time. Recognizing that intravascular ultrasound, sometimes called IVUS, and separately, OCT—short for optical coherence tomography—were developed independently to examine inside the blood vessel." #Conavi #CardiovascularImaging #InterventionalCardiology #MedicalDevice #HeartHealth #Innovation #IVUS #OCT #AIinHealthcare #CardiacIntervention #HealthTech #Medtech #Cardiology #HybridImaging Conavi.com Download the transcript here

Theresa Lyons, CEO and Founder of Navigating AWEtism, is providing parents with current, accurate information about autism to help them focus on manageable issues for their child. She strongly cautions about information about autism from social media, which is often over-generalized and incorrect. Autism spectrum disorder presents a wide range of behaviors from mild communication difficulties to complex challenges requiring lifelong care, and Theresa advocates for an individual approach, including lab testing, before choosing a treatment plan. Theresa explains, "What we strive to do is educate parents on the cutting-edge information of autism so that they can make the best decisions for their kids. All too often, parents and I, including myself, are autism parents. We get information that is 20 to 30 years old. So it's really important to make decisions for your child's future based on quality information." "So autism is a spectrum, and we can talk about one end of the spectrum. A child might be speaking, but they might have difficulty having a back-and-forth conversation. They might be very limited in what they're talking about. Let's say maybe they have a huge interest in trains, and you can talk to this child about trains, but then if you try to have a conversation about the weather, your sneakers, or the beach, something you like to do, then that's where conversation doesn't happen at all. Kids on that end of the spectrum can dress themselves, and they can feed themselves. And when they get older, they will go across the street and potentially drive a car. So that's one end of the spectrum. And then on the other end is more profound autism. And those are kids who might not ever dress themselves or might not have the ability to cut their food ever." #NavigatingAWEtism #AWEtism #Autism #AutismSpectrum #Pediatrics #Healthcare #EvidenceBasedMedicine #Neurodevelopment #FamilyCenteredCare #HealthcareProviders #Misinformation #QualityCare AWEtism.net Download the transcript here

Lori Runion, a director at Resultant, identifies inadequate scheduling and related staffing unpredictability as a central cause of clinician burnout. Healthcare organizations traditionally rely on historical averages for scheduling, often resulting in a mismatch between patient demand and clinician capacity. Breaking down data silos and using analytics and AI to create predictive staffing models can help forecast demand, anticipate seasonal spikes, and enable proactive staffing to reduce clinician burnout. Lori explains, " From my perspective, burnout is driven at the operational level. To say it most simply, I think that burnout is driven by unpredictability, specifically, what I want to talk a little bit about, predictive staffing. And so, when we think about staffing, the unpredictability and misalignment between patient demand and staffing capacity are really what's driving it. So I don't think it's a lack of resilience. I don't think it's necessarily that there are gaps in care, but there are constant coverage gaps and volatility in the workload. And so I think it's ultimately driven by that mismatch when patient demand and clinician capacity are misaligned. I think that healthcare is traditionally staffed based on historical averages rather than dynamic demand or patterns, and that's what creates the unpredictable shifts and last-minute schedule changes that lead to overextension and exhaustion, which drive burnout." "So, for example, you think about your EHR, which includes your demand, your patient medical record, and you have a scheduling system that shows available capacity, and you may have claims data that shows utilization patterns or other things. So when they are only looking at one system, they have some blind spots. And so I think that if they're looking at connected systems and pulling all that data together to identify patterns and really see the full picture, that's where they can align patient demand with staffing capacity." #Resultant #HealthcareBurnout #PatientSafety #HealthcareLeadership #PredictiveAnalytics #HealthcareData #WorkforceOptimization#ClinicianBurnout #HealthcareAnalytics #PredictiveStaffing #HealthcareIT #DataDriven #PatientCare #HealthcareLeadership #AIinHealthcare #WorkforceOptimization #HealthcareInnovation resultant.com Download the transcript here

Bill Heller, Chief Operating Officer at CHG Healthcare, is focused on the significant and growing demand for physicians across numerous specialties and on providing a flexible solution for healthcare facilities to maintain services with temporary physician staffing. Rural healthcare facilities are especially dependent on temporary staffing to overcome challenges in attracting and keeping permanent medical professionals. Physicians at all career stages are drawn to locum tenens work, and it has evolved from a niche practice to a mainstream strategy for healthcare facilities and physicians. Bill explains, "CHG Healthcare is a physician workforce solutions company, which means our primary business is physician staffing. So we're the largest physician staffing company in the country. We staff primarily on a part-time temporary basis, but we also do perm and a whole bunch of other stuff. We also do allied staffing, so we have a big staffing arm." "In addition to that, we have an advisory services arm where we advise clients on how to run more effective client solutions through a ton of different advisory opportunities. We also have a tech solutions arm, and so that's what makes up our workforce solutions. On the primary business, our locum tenant business, which is our temporary physician business, we connect healthcare providers with hospitals, clinics, and communities across the country where there are significant gaps in healthcare delivery, and we help them fill those gaps." #CHGHealthcare #HealthcareStaffing #LocumTenens #PhysicianJobs #HealthcareWorkforce #RuralHealthcare #MedicalStaffing #HealthcareSolutions #PhysicianRecruitment #HealthcareCareers CHGhealthcare.com Download the transcript here

Jean-Philippe Vert, the Co-Founder and CEO of Bioptimus, is building a foundational AI model for biology to solve the problem of siloed biomedical research. Key goals are to bridge the translational gaps between drug discovery and development, and between clinical research and real-world patient outcomes, and to redesign clinical trials for greater efficiency and improved results. Creating digital twins of patients is a way to simulate treatment outcomes and create synthetic control arms for clinical trials, ultimately lowering the risk and cost of drug development and enabling the creation of new medicines for a broader range of conditions, including rare diseases. Jean-Philippe explains, "So at its core, what we try to build at Bioptimus is the foundational AI infrastructure for biology. The problem we're trying to solve is that biology is complex and operates across different scales, from genes and proteins to cells, organs, patients, etc. And historically, lots of research, lots of biological, biomedical research has been very siloed, has been focusing on specific aspects of biology, like studying only genes or studying only cells. What we are building at Bioptimus is an AI-intelligent system that can see across all these layers, all of these cases, to get a holistic picture of biology. And it's not only a scientific endeavor, but the reason why it's hard to make a drug today, why so many diseases remain untreated, is that the siloed nature of biomedical research has created difficulties in how we move from research in discovery, like understanding a disease, to making a treatment for the patients." "So we have indeed a model called H-Optimus, which is a foundation model for one type of modality, which is one thing you see in an image. It's for histopathology slides. This is when someone has, for example, a cancer, you take a biopsy and then typically a pathologist looks at the biopsy under the microscope to characterize the disease, to see if there are cancer cells, to see the shape, to see the organization, and so to pose a diagnostic and suggest a treatment. We have trained an AI system that helps pathologists be better because our systems have been trained by looking at billions of such images, and so have a very detailed understanding of the subtle variations that can be observed in images." #Bioptimus #ArtificialIntelligence #DrugDiscovery #Biotechnology #PrecisionMedicine #FoundationModels #BiologyAI #ClinicalTrials #CancerResearch #RareDiseases #DigitalHealth #Innovation bioptimus.com Download the transcript here

David Stamler, CEO of Alterity Therapeutics, is developing a drug to treat multiple system atrophy (MSA), a rare and rapidly progressing neurodegenerative disease that often presents as Parkinson's disease but is distinct and more aggressive. There is no single genetic cause or specific biomarker, making accurate diagnosis a significant challenge. The lead drug is a novel small molecule designed to manage excess reactive iron in the brain, which drives the disease, and may be effective for other neurodegenerative diseases involving iron dysregulation. David explains, "Multiple system atrophy is a rare disease, and that's part of the reason people may not know so much about it. It is a neurodegenerative disease, and as the name implies, there are multiple regions of the brain that are affected, hence the term multiple systems that are governed by those regions of the brain. And as the disease progresses, some of these regions degenerate, and you get abnormal function in various areas." "Now, we like to characterize the disease as a Parkinsonian disorder, which means early on, it can look like Parkinson's disease. And that's kind of a good descriptor to help people understand what it might look like, but it's distinct from Parkinson's disease, and it progresses a lot faster, a lot more rapidly. So it's a disease that people don't know about, probably because no one famous has been diagnosed with MSA, although I'm sure various famous people have probably had the disease and maybe didn't know it." #AlterityTherapeutics #MultipleSystemAtrophy #MSAAwareness #NeurodegenerativeDisease #Biotech #Phase3 #Neurology #MSA #ClinicalTrials #AlterityTherapeutics #ATH434 #Biotech #RareDisease #Neurodegeneration #DrugDevelopment #MedicalBreakthrough #IronChaperone Alteritytx.com Download the transcript here