Empowered Patient Podcast

Dana Brown serves as President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board at iCAD Inc., which has developed a next-generation approach that leverages advancements in AI and imaging technology to improve the accuracy and efficiency of breast cancer screening. This technology can help reduce unnecessary biopsies and additional tests while more accurately identifying cancers that need immediate attention. The concerning trend of rising breast cancer in younger women highlights the importance of early detection and personalized care plans. Dana explains, "Literally, iCAD's first FDA-cleared product in a first-generation AI was around 2002. So it's been well over 20 years. We're now on our fourth generation. So, yes, you're very accurate in describing this as a next-generation approach. So, not only has imaging technology improved over the past 20 years, but artificial intelligence has also improved. We continue to leverage the latest in artificial intelligence technology, how the artificial intelligence can be trained and learn, and a broad base of researchers that help us develop the solution. So you have new minds, new ways to think about solving the problem, and new technology that can be used to solve the problem. Then, there is a new underlying screening technology that gets better and better at clearer imaging." "The American Cancer Society reports that if we can catch a breast cancer very early in stage one, then the likelihood of, I'll say surviving breast cancer is 99%, so very, very high. So the earlier we can catch a breast cancer, the less invasive and costly and length of time the treatments can be. There are more options for those patients as well as the likelihood of a positive outcome, being able to again, have no further evidence of the disease is increased." #iCAD #BreastCancer #BreastCancerScreening #Radiology #CancerDetection #BreastBiopsies #Mammogram #WomensHealth #MedAI icadmed.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Rany Aburashed, CEO and Founder of Neurogen Biomarking, is using a blood-based biomarker looking at p-tau 217 to detect early signs of Alzheimer's disease, up to 8-10 years before the onset of clinical symptoms. The company has built an ecosystem to provide patients with a comprehensive health assessment with an at-home blood test, cognitive testing, access to neurologists, and education on lifestyle changes that can support a good quality of life. Their mission is to take a proactive rather than the current reactive approach to diagnosing and slowing the progression of cognitive decline. Rany explains, "The challenge for us, and this is what I saw from years of clinical practice and hospital management, is that a disease like Alzheimer's operates almost like a green light. Life is okay, you're having minor issues, but for the most part, you're moving along. Then suddenly you notice a sentinel event, which then becomes that red light, and now you have Alzheimer's dementia. And so the issue that is at the core of Alzheimer's is early detection. Is there a way for us to detect things earlier and, in turn, provide patients with an opportunity to take control of their dementia and make the necessary changes in treatments?" "In the current setting, the way that we do it in the United States and around the world is really reactive and it is too late by the time your mother or father is developing cognitive complaints. It's very easy to ignore the early stages of it because you can function for three to five years without really anything dramatic happening. So suddenly, when that dramatic instance occurs, for example, you leave the stove on, or you get lost driving back to your house, something that's very obviously outside of the normal, that might trigger you to say, "Let's get Mom checked." "At launch, our focus is on using the biomarker called p-tau 217. This biomarker can be detected now with more technologies in the blood at microscopic levels, and we couldn't do that effectively 10 or 15 years ago. That science has caught up, and the technology has caught up to a point that now, even 8 to 10 years before any significant clinical symptoms occur, we're able to detect if this protein is elevated. Now, if this protein is elevated, depending on the assay that we use, it's about 93%-97% sensitive for potentially developing Alzheimer's long-term. So it's a good protein to use as a triage protein." #NeurogenBiomarkings #Biomarkers #BloodBiomarkers #Alzheimers #AlzheimersDisease #CognitiveDecline #Dementia #EarlyDetection #Neurologists NeurogenBiomarking.com Download the transcript here

Ram Krishnan, CEO of Valant, uses AI to make mental health care more accessible through their practice management and patient engagement platforms designed specifically for mental health providers. AI is applied to improve administrative efficiency, address billing and compliance, and drive successful patient outcomes. New solutions are needed due to the growing patient population for mental health services and the potential of advanced therapeutics that are transforming the behavioral health environment, where demand is outpacing the supply of mental health care providers. Ram explains, "If I took a step back, AI - let's describe what AI is across a practice. Multiple functional verticals exist within a practice, including marketing. A team is trying to acquire the right type of patients. There's your administrative vertical, if you will, which is just making sure you're running the business well. You have your clinical vertical, which is the time the clinician, prescriber, psychiatrist, and practitioner spend with the patient. There's billing, making sure you're getting paid for all this work, and there's compliance along the way. And each of these verticals has the potential to have an increased efficiency, first and foremost, by AI. Secondly, behind it are improved outcomes." "Yes, I think we are getting into a wild realm of possibilities for our application of AI. I think what we are making in our systems is a cautious and practical, pragmatic approach of working our way through the functions that I laid out, and then the goals in terms of efficiency. I think there is a wide range of potential here with AI. When people think of AI in mental health, they immediately think of an AI avatar of some kind that you can converse with and becomes a replacement for the therapist and a replacement for the understanding and awareness of everything. From the words you're choosing to the changes in your vocal modulation to the facial expressions on your face. Putting that all through the analytics to come back and assess risk of things like you said, suicide ideation or violence, potential violence. I think those are much later-term applications. There has to be a purpose behind that." #Valant #BehavioralHealth #MentalHealth #PatientEngagement #PracticeManagement valant.io Download the transcript here

Jaya Tiwari, Senior Vice President of Clinical and Regulatory Affairs at XVIVO, which is focused on improving organ preservation for transplantation. Current organ preservation methods using ice coolers limit the time and distance organs can be transported. XVIVO's perfusion technology can significantly extend the preservation time of hearts, kidneys, livers, and lungs, providing hospitals and transplant centers access to more viable organs. The company is passionate about increasing organ availability to give more patients access to life-saving transplants. Jaya explains, "I take it back to 1967 when the first heart transplant was performed in Cape Town, and the way that the heart was preserved and transported in essentially an ice box. The standard of care for the preservation of organs is still an ice or an ice cooler with ice. So, this decreases metabolic activities. So, to try to preserve the organs so that you can get them from the donor to the recipient, the problem is that the organs are not viable for a very long time, and they start to degrade very quickly. That really limits the amount of time that the organs can be on ice, transported from the donor to the recipient hospital. Because of that logistical complexity, a lot of organs are ultimately not transplanted." "There have been some preclinical studies that we've done that have shown viability of the heart tissue for up to 24 hours. But what I think is probably the most remarkable example that we've seen is that the universities in Paris have put together something called an investigator-initiated study, where they actually were able to transport a donor heart from the French West Indies to Paris for transplant. That was about 12 hours that the heart was in transport and using the device. So that's remarkable because that essentially tripled the standard preservation time for hearts. Now, in the US, we have a clinical trial where we're currently seeking approval from the FDA that it's safe and effective to use this device for up to 12 hours." #XVIVO #HealthcareInnovation #LifeSavingTechnology #PatientOutcomes #OrganTransplantation #OrganTransplants xvivogroup.com Download the transcript here

Brian Drozdowicz, Senior VP and General Manager for Acute and Payer at PointClickCare, provides a platform using predictive analytics and AI for data sharing and collaboration across healthcare stakeholders. Interoperability has been an ongoing challenge due to the lack of standards and clear governance to support data sharing. The shift to value-based care drives the need for more access to patient data to improve patient outcomes, facilitate care transitions, and reduce readmissions and costs. Brian explains, "PointClickCare has been a player in the market for quite some time. We're best known for the market-leading senior care EHR that we've had in market for 20-plus years. I run a business unit that sits by the side of that. We refer to that as the acute and payer business. And ultimately, this additional business and value proposition to the market operates the largest care collaboration network, sharing healthcare data across all the different stakeholders, hospitals, health plans, ambulatory clinics, community providers, and connecting is our core business. So we're ultimately in the business of sharing data and doing that safely, securely in a trusted way." "There are a lot of ways of driving adoption and sharing data at scale. I'd call out a couple of key areas in which we've seen a lot of progress in recent years. First is having well-established technology standards that safely and securely transmit that data. Number Two is having to share that data. So, otherwise, it's a bunch of data flowing back and forth just for the sake of data. And that doesn't solve anything with value-based care. Putting a set of guardrails in place requires providers and payers to work together with this data." #PointClickCare #HealthcareData #Interoperability #MedAI #DataSilos #ValueBasedCare #VBC pointclickcare.com Download the transcript here

G.T. LaBorde, CEO and Co-Founder of IllumiCare, focuses on reducing hospital clinical waste. Doctors often make decisions about tests, medications, and procedures without knowing the actual cost to the hospital and the patient. The IllumiCare platform aims to nudge doctors to make cost-effective decisions without compromising the quality of patient care by providing cost information and clinical guidance at the point of care. Another benefit is the reduction in overtesting and overprescribing, supporting efforts to improve patient safety.. G.T. explains, "When doctors make decisions about what test to order and what medications to prescribe, particularly in the inpatient setting, they have no idea what the cost is. They don't know the relative cost of one drug or another, and it's not a knock on doctors. It's very difficult to know because there are, in our average hospital across hundreds of hospitals, something like 2,000 different medications on the formulary that are available to order if you're a provider." "We self-impose a limit, on average, taking only 60 seconds of a provider's attention a day. We calculate when we nudge somebody, when we present something in their workflow, how much time is it on the screen? And it comes down to 60 seconds a day of attention that we take. So we take great pride in how much technology we use to figure out when not to say something or not. We try to figure out the person most likely to take action, and is this information germane to this person for this patient, such that there's a high probability they'll take action? And we measure how frequently people take the action we recommend, and it's several times higher than similar alerts within the electronic medical record." #IllumiCare #ValueBasedCare #VBC #HealthcareInnovation #ClinicalDecisionSupport #HealthIT #HospitalIT #EHR illumicare.com Download the transcript here

Gary Falcetano, Scientific Affairs Manager for Allergy at Thermo Fisher Scientific, is a leader in allergy and autoimmune diagnostics, providing specific IgE tests and the instruments to run them. Accurately diagnosing allergies can be challenging, but specific IgE testing can help confirm the underlying causes by looking at individual allergen components for precise diagnosis. This is the first step in determining the appropriate management approach to potentially interrupt the atopic march, where allergies can progress or even be life-threatening. Gary explains, "It runs the gamut of just about anything that could potentially be an allergy disease. So I think the majority of our testing is done in both environmental allergies and food allergies. What people think about when we, especially this time of year in the US, with spring about to become a big onslaught, are environmental allergies, including pollens, grass, trees, and weeds. Also, looking at some of the indoor triggers to environmental allergies like dust mites, pets, molds, and mice is pretty key when assessing for respiratory-type symptoms. On the food side, any of a number of foods can potentially cause a patient to produce specific IgE, which is the sensitization that allows us to become allergic." "We all think of respiratory allergies as straightforward, but there's an overlap of symptoms, especially from non-allergic causes, that can cause similar symptoms. So when thinking about respiratory allergies, we think about nasal congestion, post-nasal drip, and cough. Those symptoms can all be certainly caused by allergies, but they also can be caused by non-allergic triggers. That's one of the places where diagnostic allergy testing or specific IgE testing comes in to confirm whether we're dealing with an allergy. Then, if it's an allergy, what specifically is driving the symptoms? Once we rule out allergy, we can go down a whole other diagnostic pathway for all the various causes, like non-allergic rhinitis." #ThermoFisherScientific #Allergies #AllergyTesting #ClinicalDiagnostics #PatientCare #IgETesting thermofisher.com Download the transcript here

Chia-Lin Simmons, CEO of LogicMark, is developing technology solutions to help seniors age independently and safely. Their AgeTech ecosystem addresses the requirements and comfort levels of the diverse aging population and provides predictive technology to identify potential health issues and emergencies. The key is keeping a human-centric approach to the application of this technology and integration with other health monitoring devices and apps. Chia-Lin explains, "At LogicMark, we tell people that the medical react technology business is saying that our job is to make better technology to help identify that fall or a catastrophe or a health issue, and then help as we can within that golden hour in a medical emergency. When I joined the company in June of 2021, our goal was not just to be even better at reactive technology but to develop predictive technology, which is to take a look at the pattern of living and your experiences and being able to stop that first initial catastrophe or fall if we can. And that's where our interest and a lot of our IT development have been focused on." "Our job as technology providers to caretakers and those they love is not that we're meant to be technology that is helicoptering over, for example, your parents. Our job is to provide a safety net. And I think that visual, to give you a sense of what we think is important, at the end of the day, your parents are not your children. They want to live independently and live the life that they want to live fully as grown adults. And so our job is to provide them with the capability to be independent and safe, as well as the safety and privacy they want as grown adults. And so, how does that translate? At the center of everything we do, we call compassionate technology or human-centric technology." #LogicMark #AgeTech #HealthTech #MedTech #ElderCare #AgingInPlace #SeniorSafety #Innovation #FutureOfHealth #HealthcareInnovation #ConnectedHealth logicmark.com Download the transcript here

Martin Brenner, CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of iBio, is focused on the untapped potential of therapeutic antibodies for obesity and cardiometabolic diseases. Leveraging AI and machine learning, iBio is streamlining the antibody discovery and optimization process and addressing the need for more complex antibody mechanisms of action. Their lead candidate, iBio 600, is an anti-myostatin antibody designed to address the side effects of muscle mass and bone density loss associated with current GLP-1 therapies. Martin explains, "We can separate this into multiple areas. First of all, there's a predictive model that suggests that there are 5,000 different targets related to disease out there. So, there are 5,000 different possibilities to make medicines. All of the currently approved antibodies target only 92 targets. Even worse, 40% of approved antibodies only target about 10. So you can imagine there's a huge untapped potential of novel targets for which antibodies could be used. The problem is that the technologies must keep up with this to open that novel target space. That is problem number one." "So, as you know, AI has gotten a little bit of a bad reputation over the last few years, and there was a huge hype about this, and I want to be very clear about this. It takes more than 10,000 steps to make a medicine. At iBio, we enable three of these steps with generative AI. So, that does not make us an AI company. That does not make our molecules AI drugs. What it does is it actually makes it possible for us to create medicines that we couldn't do before. So, the way we use AI at iBio is multiplefold. First, we start our discovery process with the epitope steering engine. You have to imagine that drug targets are massive proteins, and only very small regions on these proteins have a biological function. So you want to get your antibody exactly to those regions that cause a biological function." #iBio #DrugDiscovery #MedAI #Obesity #GLP1 #CardioMetabolicDiseases #Antibodies #AntibodyTherapies #Myostatin iBioinc.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Lauren Parks Nicola, Chief Medical Officer at RevealDx, has extensive experience dealing with the challenges of accurately describing lung nodules and distinguishing between benign and malignant nodules based on visual inspection of CT scans. RevealDx software tool integrates into the radiologists' workflow and uses advanced algorithms and a large database of lung nodule data to provide a malignancy score for lung nodules. This technology can help reduce unnecessary follow-up scans and invasive procedures for patients with benign lung nodules while identifying high-risk ones requiring more aggressive investigation. Lauren explains, "Reveal's product is a software that characterizes lung nodules. So lung nodules, little blips on a lung that we find on a chest CT. And the thing is, they're very, very common. Lots of patients have them, they can turn out to be cancer, most of them aren't. But with the knowledge that we have right now, just as radiologists looking at those nodules, it's really hard to tell which ones are going to turn out to be cancerous and which ones aren't." "The software tool characterizes which nodules are more likely to be malignant and might need faster diagnosis, more aggressive workup, biopsy, some interventions, things that can help us diagnose cancer earlier when it's easier, less expensive, and much better for the patient to treat versus the ones that don't need that kind of care. And for a lot of patients, that means not needing follow-up scans, not needing biopsies, and not needing invasive treatments to prevent something that would never have been a problem for them in the first place. So it is that added information, as well as added clinical information, gives us and the patients tools to better predict how these are going to behave." #RevealDx #RadiologyAI #MedicalImaging #Radiology #LungCancer #DigitalHealth #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #AIinHealthcare #MedicalAI reveal-dx.com Download the transcript here

Daniel Getts, the CEO and Founder of Myeloid Therapeutics is focused on the role of myeloid cells in the immune response to solid tumors. These cells are the first responders in the immune system and play a crucial role in bridging the innate and adaptive immune response. The Myeloid Therapeutics' mRNA technology activates myeloid cells in tumors, making the tumor microenvironment hot and attracting other immune cells to fight the cancer. Daniel explains, "The ability to harness our immune systems has revolutionized how we treat cancer. Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go, and if you think about some of the worst of the worst cancers, such as pancreatic cancer, liver cancer, and so on, immunotherapy has still not gotten us to a place where we can solve this. It's our mission at Myeloid Therapeutics to overcome these challenges. We've uncovered a lot of really interesting things about these cancers in the last 20 years, and we've been harnessing that knowledge." "Myeloid cells are at the heart of the immune system. They're the first responders. So, if you have an infection or bump your knee, these cells are immediately called to the site to wall off and prevent any more damage. However, they also serve as the bridge to adaptive immunity, the T cells and the B cells, which are also important for integrating an immune response. In the context of COVID vaccines, we talk about antibodies and T cells, it's the myeloid cells that are essential. In the context of what we've been learning, immunotherapy, up until recently, had been very focused on T cells and how to short-circuit the whole system just by using or activating those cells to kill cancer. And what we're starting to learn is to harness the full capability of our own immune systems, you've got to go back to the start. You've got to harness the myeloid compartment so you can orchestrate all immune elements to kill cancer." #MyeloidTherapeutics #MyeloidCells #ImmuneSystem #SolidTumors #Cancer #ImmuneResponse #Oncology #TumorMicroenvironment myeloidtx.com Download the transcript here

Saul Marquez, Founder and CEO of Outcomes Rocket, emphasizes the need for strategic healthcare communications, including earned media and paid advertising, content creation, and social influencers. The explosion of social media and online news outlets has changed the healthcare information environment, challenging companies to express authentic and intentional messages to their target audience. Identifying pain points and unique propositions is key to effective healthcare messaging that persuades, motivates, and informs. Saul elaborates, "I started the Outcomes Rocket agency as a podcast, and then it evolved into a full-service agency focused on healthcare organizations, leaders, and brands looking to maximize their impact in the market and accelerate their growth. We work in four areas: strategy, earned, owned, and paid. So, under each of those categories, there are different focus areas." "It's never been more important for leaders to be authentic in an age of artificial intelligence and just so much noise. Authenticity cuts through that noise. And when I say authenticity, it's important for brands as well as leaders to be true to who they are, and it's important that the message be well-crafted and intentional. So, if you're being authentic on the fly or on the whim, that's not very strategic. You want to make sure that under the strategy and the work you do to put your messaging out there, that everything ties back to why you do what you do. How is it different? Whether you're an individual influencer or a brand, what is the promise?" #OutcomesRocket #HealthcareInnovation #DigitalMarketing #HealthTech #HealthcareCommunications OutcomesRocket.health Download the transcript here

Robert Maxwell, Founder of ClinConnect, is building this neutral third-party intermediary between patients and clinical trial sponsors, improving on the clinicaltrials.gov platform by streamlining the clinical trial enrollment process. This patient-facing platform provides patients with up-to-date information about trial options and eligibility criteria and guides them through the enrollment process. This resource is particularly significant for the rare disease community, where ClinConnect works with patient advocacy networks to improve study design and identify trial participants. Robert explains, "One thing that has changed over the last year since we last spoke is we have far more relationships and far better relationships with many clinical trial sponsors. So the folks behind whatever therapeutic or investigational, drug, biologic, whatever it might be. And so when it comes to recruitment and enrollment, we have what are called enrollment criteria, inclusion and exclusion criteria. Those are filed within the protocol with the FDA. Every clinical trial has some set of enrollment criteria." "Anyone can go to the FDA and get an understanding of what any trial enrollment criteria might be. It's listed on clinicaltrials.gov. But oftentimes what we have found is that the protocol that is on file with the FDA actually might be out of date, it might be invalid. There might be an update. There might be 10 updates that haven't been submitted to the FDA. And so what's helpful when patients work with a platform like ours, or I think we're the only one still somehow the only one doing this, is that we have those direct relationships with the sponsors." #ClinConnect #ClinicalTrials #ClinicalTrialRecruitment #ClinicalTrialEnrollment #ClinicalTrialRetention #RareDiseases clinconnect.io Download the transcript here

Angela Adams, CEO at Inflo Health, is addressing the opportunity to improve the tracking and follow-up of radiology findings. Info Health uses natural language processing to understand radiologists' reports and identify findings that require additional imaging and possible actions. Healthcare providers often lack the resources to manage radiology test results effectively. Inflo Health's solution can drive significant revenue to these providers by minimizing missed follow-ups and appointments. Angela explains, "Inflo Health is a technology company that serves healthcare—primarily health systems and imaging centers. We're built around solving the problem for health systems of never missing a follow-up related to radiology. If you look at the research, it will show you pretty readily that about 50% of radiology findings and actionable findings are missed in the healthcare system today, primarily because it's a really difficult problem to solve. You've got a radiologist who dictates a report in real-time, understanding what the imaging is showing on a patient. Many times, they dictate multiple follow-ups in a study. They might find something that's incidental, meaning they're going for an image of their cervical spine because they have an upcoming surgery, but they might find a thyroid lesion on that scan. So, for the patient, not only how do we identify that there's a follow-up in that report, but also how do we care navigate the patient in the right direction?" "The really big issues in the health system today are care navigation and the identification of follow-ups, which Inflo helps solve. We built a large language model. You probably hear that term a lot these days with ChatGPT and OpenAI and things like that. If you can think of one that's very specific to radiology language. What we've done is teach a computer to speak radiology language so that it can understand what the intention was of the radiologist. So we very much empower the radiologist, and whatever their follow-up is that they're identifying, we basically put a microphone to that, and we automate the tracking, the follow-up, the patient communication. So, we engage with the patient to ensure they understand their care. And in doing so, we're able to save - our last estimate was close to 20,000 patient lives a year." #InfloHealth #Radiology #PatientCare #HealthTech #HealthcareInnovation #MedAI inflohealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Chris Duma, President and Founder of Regeneration Biomedical, is developing stem cell therapies to treat neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, ALS, and multiple sclerosis. Their approach involves directly injecting the patient's stem cells into the brain ventricles to stimulate the brain's innate stem cells to repair and replace damaged neurons. Current clinical trials are showing promising results and, notably, minimal side effects compared to other Alzheimer's drugs. Chris explains, "So our focus is to treat the full disease and make a difference in the disease's progression. The way the disease presents itself and the way that the disease is actually cured. The focus until now has been to target particular areas of abnormality in patients’ brains. Those with Alzheimer's disease, as we know, have plaques in the brain, and they have tangles in the brain. Alzheimer's disease was discovered or invented by a pathologist in the early 1900s. When they sliced the brain of an Alzheimer's patient, they found these abnormal collections of protein, and they called them plaques and tangles. The target of most research and most treatments have been monoclonal antibodies to these plaques and tangles. And we at Regeneration Biomedical do not necessarily feel that that is the cause of the problem. We think that they're the end product of cell death. So, what you need to do is fix the problem from the origin, and there might be nothing other than a stem cell that could do that. So that is our trajectory, and that's where we are today." "We had rogue stem cell clinics out there that were giving stem cells for every possible disease, and patients were lured to places like Mexico, Germany, and China to get very expensive stem cell treatments that were probably completely worthless. The difference between them and us is that we're an FDA-cleared trial. We have gone to the FDA to do this and believe me, you are right, the FDA opening up their arms to stem cells is absolutely brand new. We're actually one of the newest kids on the block who can do this. What we're doing with our stem cells, which is directly injecting them into the brain, which we can discuss later, is the first in the world. We're at that threshold now that the FDA is probably looking more and more into this and more and more into personalized medicine. And that's what this falls into the category of as well." #RegenerationBiomedical #AlzheimersDisease #AlzheimersResearch #RegenerativeMedicine #StemCellTherapy #NeurodegenerativeDiseases #MedicalInnovation regenerationbiomedical.com Download the transcript here

Will Ho, President, CEO, and Co-Founder of IN8bio, a company developing next-generation cellular therapies using gamma delta T cells, which play a unique role in bridging the innate and adaptive immune systems. GDT cell therapies may have reduced side effects compared to other T cell therapies as they can more selectively target tumor cells while sparing healthy tissue. IN8bio is conducting clinical trials using autologous and allogeneic gamma delta T cells for leukemia and glioblastoma with the goal of eliminating the cancer. Will explains, "As you probably are aware, our immune system is generally broken down into two halves. One is the innate or the immediate portion of the system, which is why we're called IN8bio, the gamma delta T cells, which are considered innate immune cells. On the other, the adaptive is the memory part of our immune system. The gamma delta T cells bridge between both the innate and the adaptive. They actually have features across both. In particular, one of their natural functions is actually to discriminate and to distinguish between those cells that are healthy and safe versus those that are transformed or should be eliminated. That's the very challenge of cancer cells. At the end of the day, they're our own cells, and the gamma delta T cells have a unique ability to distinguish between what should be safe and left alone versus those cells that they should kill." "With the CAR T therapies, we have genetically engineered specific targets such as CD 19 or DPMA into an alpha-beta T cell - somewhat of a release and let it go. Those cells go and seek out every cell in the body that expresses its specific target and kills it. I kind of half-heartedly joke that it's a little bit like Terminator- once you let it go, it seeks its target to try to kill it, no matter the secondary damage. In many cases, we've had numerous toxicities, some of which have resulted in patient death. The gamma delta T cells are more nuanced in its approach. We have created CAR T, specifically for the biology of gamma delta T cells." "Early preclinical work shows they can discriminate between the leukemic cells that should be eliminated and the healthy tissue. This will become increasingly important as we try to target solid tumors. Solid tumors is a market that's nine times bigger than that of leukemias and lymphomas. It's challenging because the tumors, at the end of the day, are intertwined in an organ. Most likely, we need to keep those organs, whether they're your brain like in glioblastoma that we're targeting, or lung cancer or pancreatic cancer and others, we need to be able to discriminate and pick out the healthy tissue versus the tumor tissue because we can't just completely ablate the organ." #IN8bio #CancerZero #Immunotherapy #Immunology #CancerResearch #TCellEngagers #GDTCells #CART #CellTherapy #GeneTherapy #Pharmaceuticals #BioTech #ClinicalResearch IN8bio.com Download the transcript here

Patrick Mobley, CEO and Co-Founder of Vivid Health has developed a platform to address the inefficiencies in the post-acute care industry. Home health and hospice nurses often spend hours completing required paper-based forms and assessments to create personalized patient care plans and submissions for payments. This technology aims to streamline the workflow and collection of patient information while proactively monitoring patients and using AI-powered voice agents to improve patient engagement. Patrick explains, "So the way it works with your standard home health organization is that referral is received from a hospital, and most of the work from that point on takes place within any EMR. There are some other vendors that process places, but there is no getting around that form. It is required that you've got to complete every single step. There's really no difference no matter what state you're in or what jurisdiction; you might see slight variations between Medicare, Medicare Advantage, or Medicaid, but it's rather consistent across every single home agency." "Well, it's a mixture of the nurse and medical director. The nurses are often called startup care nurses. They go in the home and complete the work. It can take anywhere from two to three hours to be in the patient's home, and then once it's done, the response care goes to the medical director for sign-off. From there, there are a couple of extra steps to validate some of the information and coding associated with it. Then, it can be submitted to CMS for payment." "For that problem, we wanted to take those anywhere from one to four hours and get them down. Well, not because we're trying not to be thorough or rush onto the next patient or anything like that. It's just that there were better ways to do it, and the technology advances, especially in the AI space, have gotten to the point where you can be efficient, lower that timeframe, and still provide good quality care." #VividHealth #AIinHealthcare #HomeHealthAI #HomeHealth #HomeCare #Hospice #EmergingAI vividhealth.ai Download the transcript here

Dr. Jonathan Usuka, CEO of Sapient, uses insights about proteomics and metabolomics to provide deep molecular characterization of diseases from a single sample to support drug discovery, development, and approval. The company's unique dataset combines real-world data with longitudinal molecular profiling of tens of thousands of samples across different diseases, ethnicities, genders, and ages. By measuring proteins and metabolites, this data and insights engine helps pharmaceutical companies gain a significantly more comprehensive view of the molecular basis of disease, better understand drug targets, and predict potential drug outcomes and safety. Jonathan explains, "We support drug discovery and drug development, and a couple of things are going on in the industry right now in discovery and development. One is the overall pharma landscape of how a drug gets approved. That's been fairly static since the 1970s with the creation of the FDA. So clinical trials are well established, but the structure of it was based around not knowing much about the underlying drug target that your drug is interacting with. Since then, they've tightened up the requirements around mechanisms of action, but mostly, the process itself is almost protein agnostic in terms of the development process and how the drug interacts with patients." "So what we do, what has happened recently, is a revolution in understanding the molecular basis of disease and how the therapeutics interact with it at a molecular level. We support pharmaceutical companies in understanding the safety and the efficacy and being able to predict how their therapies will do in the clinic, and then really understanding a lot more about the available drug targets, which expands the arsenal of ways to fight disease." "At Sapient, we don't just identify dynamic biomarkers, biomarkers that change with disease or change in response to therapy. We also give a lot of context about those biomarkers. We also say where we have seen those biomarkers occur and how they have changed in response to other therapies, disease conditions, and immunological responses. So, a pharma company can see better what it's getting into when it invests in a dynamic biomarker." #SapientBio #Multiomics #Proteomics #Metabotomics #DarkProteome #BeyondtheGenome #Plasmaproteomics #Biomarkers sapient.bio Download the transcript here

Dr. Joel Salinas, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer, and Dr. Julius Bruch, Co-Founder and CEO of Isaac Health, leverage virtual care and home visits to provide proactive, technology-enabled services for early diagnosis and treatment of dementia. Their mission is to reduce barriers to cognitive assessment and improve access to personalized care plans and treatments that can delay brain disease progression. The key is respecting the patient's decisions and building trust with the care team. Joel explains, "The first thing is really just meeting people where they're at. It's so hard to get access to high-quality care due to wait times and geographic reasons. What we're building at Isaac is meant to require zero distance and move a hundred times faster than the current care journey. The other piece is we develop these partnerships where we're much more proactive about identifying changes that someone might be having with memory or thinking. We are looking at risk factors that they may have within their health record and then actually doing some outreach to those who may have some undiagnosed cognitive impairment. Part of the goal here is by meeting people when their symptoms are at their earliest, we have an opportunity of really a golden window of time to be able to bring in interventions that can impact the long-term trajectory of their brain health." Julius elaborates, "We have built a very extensive technology platform that underpins the entire care journey, from identifying and screening patients to diagnosing, treating, and care management, and seeing as you specifically asked about the diagnosis part. So once we've identified that the member is at high risk, we reach out to them and enroll them in one of our programs. The first visit is generally a medical assessment, and we use a neuropsychologist who does that initial assessment. Still, our platform guides that whole interaction to make sure that we collect all the right information in the most efficient way possible. So it's still very much over Zoom because it is the most effective way to get to the information in this population. Our platform supports the whole care flow and makes sure that it's run as efficiently as possible." #IsaacHealth #BrainHealth #DementiaCare #Caregiversupport #GUIDEModel #DigitalHealth #HealthEquity #EarlyDetection #DigitalHealthcare #Telehealth #InnovativeHealthcare #PatientEmpowerment myisaachealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Traci Sweet, Co-Founder and COO of Holon Health has developed an approach to treating substance use disorder that emphasizes integrating physical and behavioral health with an awareness of the impact of social determinants of health. Focusing on serving a marginalized criminal justice population that has struggled to navigate the healthcare system, Holon Health is making treatments accessible with 24/7 digital support and human-to-human interactions. Features of the Vibe app include daily affirmations, lessons, and contingency management. The key is looking forward, not revisiting the past. Traci explains, "We developed Holon Health because so many people struggle with navigating the system, particularly in terms of integrated complete treatment, for so many years now. And I've been a doctor in the field for 31 years. For so many years, we've had such a spidered system where we look at the physical health of a patient, and we look at their behavioral health and SUD needs, and we never come together to look at that in a whole body space. So Holon focuses on fully integrating care between physical health needs, substance use disorder, behavioral health, and the additional social determinants of health. So housing, employment, education. We throw everything we can at the clients. On top of that, the addition of our digital app called Holon Vibe really makes treatment accessible 365 days a year, 24/7." "We serve predominantly folks at the intersection of criminal justice and healthcare. My co-founder is formerly very enmeshed in working with the criminal justice population from his former company. I also have some Department of Corrections in my background as well. This patient has been marginalized in many ways and has found just getting through the system without judgment, without stigma, without having to focus on their shame. Their trauma has found it very difficult to navigate. So we're focused on changing that experience, moving this patient in the direction of preventative care, rewarding pro-social behaviors, and offering support that is kind of like Planet Fitness, just judgment-free. And it's been an amazing experience so far." #HolonHealth #CriminalJusticePopulation #HolisticHealthcare #SDOH #SubstanceUseDisorder holonhealth.com Download the transcript here