Empowered Patient Podcast

Bill Snyder, CEO and Founder of Cylinder, is addressing the high prevalence of digestive health issues using a virtual care model to provide access to a coordinated care team, including dieticians and health coaches, to offer personalized care plans. GI conditions are complex and involve a combination of genetic predisposition, environmental factors, and dietary influences. There are strong correlations between the gut and brain, as well as digestive health and various physical and mental conditions. Cylinder fills a gap in traditional GI care, where physicians often lack extensive nutritional training. Bill explains, "First and foremost, we think about the patients that we serve, and the patients that we serve come to us from across the country. We serve patients in every state across the US, and they suffer from a variety of GI-related conditions. That's things like ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, irritable bowel syndrome, and GERD. It's also a large population who don't have a formal diagnosis, but are symptomatic of GI conditions. So they may have chronic bloating, chronic constipation, and chronic heartburn, and they may not know what the underlying cause is. And then we also reach those members through our clients, which are large self-funded organizations and health plans. People traditionally gain access to Cylinder as part of their employee benefits package." "But there's also a lot that we continue to understand in terms of our overall digestive health system connection. The gut-brain axis, which serves as a bilateral feedback loop between the gut and the brain, is where we found that your digestive health often correlates with your mental health, and vice versa. So we know that some of the reasons for the onset of these conditions can be genetic, but to your point, we're also seeing a lot of impact from our environment and certainly from the foods we eat. And so as you think about the American diet, and as you think about how that's changed over the past several decades, we're seeing an increase in the incidence of these conditions and an increase in people who are presenting with these symptoms and not really sure where to go or what to do." #CylinderHealth #GIhealth #digestivehealth #cylinderhealth #GIcare #virtualhealth #employeebenefits cylinderhealth.com Download the transcript here

Pat Michael, Director of Patient Contact Services at Nebraska Medicine, highlights the challenges of high-volume patient contact centers and how agentic AI can improve operational efficiency, enhance patient access, and allow human agents to focus on more complex and critical calls. The AI agent offers patients self-service options for scheduling, cancellations, and medication refills, resulting in a 40% reduction in call volume to human operators. Integrating AI into the contact center also enables the prioritization of time-sensitive calls, such as those related to organ transplant coordination. Pat explains, "I'm the Patient Contact Services Director for Nebraska Medicine, which means I oversee our three main contact centers. They're our ambulatory contact center, which takes and schedules all the calls for our ambulatory clinic, and our radiology contact center, which schedules all of our outpatient radiology services. And then our medical communication center, which is our 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operation with our hospital operators and a group of triage nurses." "So, some of the challenges that we had are that one of the big things is that we deal with the sheer volume of calls coming into the contact center. And so through the three contact centers, we have about 2.5 million calls that come in, but they're not evenly distributed. They come in when they come in. And so the key to success is managing all these complex calls while ensuring accuracy in the call handling. And what does that mean in the simplest terms? You have to have time to handle the calls accurately. Are we actually staying ahead of the volume, or are we just trying to catch up?" #NebraskaMedicine #ActiumHealth #AIAgents #PatientEngagement #healthtech #AgenticAI #automation Nebraskamed.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Peter Altman, President and CEO of BioCardia, is focused on treating ischemic heart failure and chronic myocardial ischemia using autologous cells from the patient's bone marrow. The company has developed a cost-effective model that utilizes a pre-procedure diagnostic to select the optimal patients for this point-of-care system, which processes their cells in a single procedure. A key technology is the Helix catheter system, which enables minimally invasive delivery of cells into the heart, aided by the Heart3D Fusion imaging platform that provides a 3D map for precise cell delivery. Peter explains, "BioCardia's focus is on ischemic etiology of heart disease. This is heart disease that results from poor perfusion, typically following, for example, a heart attack, which is an ischemic disease. And the two diseases we're working on are ischemic heart failure, which is often characterized by a large dilated heart. And in the second is chronic myocardial ischemia, which is characterized by what's called refractory angina or chest pain that actually can be incredibly severe. And so are our focus areas. And we're advancing cell therapies that have been shown to inherently improve the cells we're looking at, which are cells from the bone marrow space, the mononuclear cells that contain the CD34 and CD133 cell populations. They're actually involved in forming new microvasculature and supply." "What we've done is come at it from a different perspective. Instead of selecting the cells and then manufacturing in a remote facility, we have a pre-procedure diagnostic that enables us to select the patients who have appropriate cells and then process them with a point-of-care cell processing platform, which involves just a simple disposable cartridge. And then we can treat these patients in a standard interventional cardiology setting at relatively low cost compared to all cell therapies." #BioCardia #HeartDisease #AutologousCellTherapy #CellTherapy #3DImaging #Heart3DFusion #CardiAMP biocardia.com Download the transcript here

Marissa Fayer, CEO of DeepLook Medical, points out the challenges of detecting breast cancer in dense breast tissue using mammography. The DeepLook DP Precise platform is a visual intelligence tool to help radiologists see inside dense tissue more clearly without disrupting their workflow, potentially reducing the need for additional tests or biopsies. A recent FDA mandate requiring providers to inform patients about their breast density has increased patient demand for better screening tools Marissa explains, "We're focused on breast imaging, and it's very specifically in dense breasts, because unfortunately, with dense, it's like seeing a cotton ball in the cloud. Radiologists have a really hard time seeing that in standard ways. This is a known problem. I developed the three mammography systems, so I absolutely know that it's a problem. We help radiologists visualize better with visual intelligence to be able to see inside these mammograms so that they potentially don't have to send their patients back for additional ultrasounds, other mammograms, or even biopsies." "So dense breasts show up white on mammograms, and cancer shows up white. So again, it's the analogy of the cotton bowl in the cloud. It might be there, but it might not be. The cloud is just hiding the cotton ball. This is just how X-ray technology is. It's been a problem and known since its inception, and unfortunately 45% to 50% of all women have dense breasts. And so, this is a very common problem, and there's nothing anybody can do. You can't diet or change the way your body composition is. In reality, this is just an additional add-on to existing screening that is a standard of care to help women." #DeepLookMedical #WomenInHealthTech #BreastCancerAwareness #DenseBreastTissue #AIinHealthcare #DigitalHealth #HealthEquity #EarlyDetection #EmpoweredPatients #PatientCenteredCare #WomensHealth #Breastcancer deeplookmedical.com Download the transcript here

Dan Cohen, President and Co-Founder of Adhere+, is advancing the role and function of remote therapeutic monitoring by asking patients a few questions every day through a smartphone app. Gathering this kind of data makes in-person visits with providers more productive and insightful. It helps providers manage chronic conditions and pain by using direct and indirect questions to gain a holistic view of the patient's overall well-being. This type of real-world data shows promise for enhancing clinical trials and powering AI-driven healthcare insights. Dan explains, "At its core, what we're doing is monitoring patients in between their visits with physicians. Now, I know a lot of your listeners have heard about telemedicine and telehealth, and sometimes they think they're the same thing, but they're not. Telemedicine is a synchronous communication where you'll be on your computer on a Zoom call with your doctor. That's telemedicine, where the physician is actually treating you as you would be in the office." "Telehealth is what happens in between physician meetings. It goes back to a very simple principle of medicine, something that physicians learn in the first two weeks of medical school. And that simple principle is the more often you touch a patient, the better the outcome is going to be. And in our telehealth approach using remote therapeutic monitoring, our physicians touch their patients every day for a brief few seconds to reinforce their care plan, to help the patients know that they're being treated, and for the patients to be able to act and react appropriately for their disease state." "The clinical questions are designed by clinicians around the country, and these questions change every day. They have normative ranges set in the background of those questions, and it really allows the physicians to drill down. We have default protocols, of course, to get practices started, and then physicians can titrate the questions to their needs. But if you think about the questions, it's the types of questions the physician is going to ask you when you're sitting in session with one another to try and find out what's happening." #AdHerePlus #RTM #RemoteTherapeuticMonitoring #PainAwarenessMonth #USPain #ChangingthePainEquation #ChronicPain #DigitalHealth adhereplus.com Download the transcript here

Sam Libby is President and Managing Director of TCB Capital Advisors, a healthcare-focused investment and advisory firm with a focus on improving patient outcomes in oncology, neurodegenerative diseases, and women's health. The firm evaluates early-stage companies based on the strength of clinical data, scientific and medical expertise, and technology, which may have been overlooked or struggled to raise funding. Trends TCB is keeping an eye on include diagnostics and preventive healthcare, as well as the growing interest in women's health, an underinvested sector that presents significant opportunities for innovation and investment. Sam explains, "I think first and foremost, we look at the clinical data. So the way that we built TCD is that we have a team of experienced bankers and investors who work with early-stage companies. We also have on the other side of the house commercial experts and consultants who can do, I like to always say they can do all the things that bankers talk about. So, post-merger integration, building out the sales funnel, and applying for grants." "The other side, which I believe is probably the most important, is the scientific, strategic, and clinical advisory boards. And so when you're looking at one of these early-stage companies, the first thing is, does the science work? Is the actual foundation for the company solid? And so having experts that can drill into that because it's very easy when you start talking about deals and an early-stage company, everyone gets excited by the vision of the CEO or founder." #TCBCapitalAdvisors #Healthcare #HeatlhcareInvestments #PatientOutcomes #Oncology #NeurodegenerativeDiseases #WomensHealth TCBcapitaladvisors.com Download the transcript here

Jon Friis, Founder and CEO of Miiskin, provides a telehealth platform to independent dermatologists and clinics, enabling them to serve a broader patient audience. Using an asynchronous model, patients submit their images and medical history for the provider to review, and then receive a diagnosis and treatment plan within 24-48 hours. This approach improves efficiency in handling routine care and prescription renewals, adds flexibility for patient convenience, and enables providers to allocate more time to address complex and high-value procedures. Jon explains, "Miiskin's mission is to make high-quality dermatology care more accessible and convenient without compromising standards and care. We see ourselves as a differentiator in the market because we're enabling providers with a dermatology platform that they can use for their audience. They're not contracting with us as a provider. We enable the clinics and the providers with this technology platform. So we give the control back to the providers so they can meet the digital-first audience themselves and grow their business based on that." "With dermatology care, the skin is visible to the patient, and I strongly believe that the future will strive towards that. Every visit starts with the patient taking images and supporting patient information and patient history before they see any provider and consult with the provider. Therefore, it's essential that the cameras are of good quality, the images are of high quality, and the image capture process is. And that's where we've been evolving a lot of imaging technology to support that process for our platform and providers." #Miiskin #DigitalDermatology #Dermatologist #Telehealth miiskin.com Download the transcript here

Sandra Johnson, Senior VP of client services at CliniComp, discusses the findings from a survey commissioned to explore the support for AI by hospital CIOs. While 80% view AI implementation as a priority, less than half have actually implemented AI tools, which is attributed to privacy concerns and the limitations of legacy systems. There was a strong desire for AI solutions to be embedded within existing systems to avoid the complexity of integrating third-party applications. The goal is to improve data exchange and interoperability to bring the focus back on the patient and improving outcomes. Sandra explains, "The survey painted a really clear picture. Hospital CIOs are not asking if AI should be a part of their strategy, but more about how to implement it. There's a lot of support for AI adoption now, and the use cases that come first and foremost are reducing administrative burden and streamlining workflows. The survey showed that 80% of CIOs are looking to automate administrative tasks as one of their top three priorities." "That really signals a shift towards using technology not just for innovation's sake, but with a focused goal. And that's to free up providers to spend more time with the patients. I think the other thing the survey pointed out is that there's a real desire for AI to be embedded within the EHR. CIOs don't want to have another layer of complexity with third-party bolt-ons. They really want an integrated solution that is reliable, scalable, and sustainable." #AIinHealthcare #HealthcareAI #HealthITAutomation #AmbientAI #ClinicalAutomation #HealthcareLeadership #CIOInsights #HealthSystemStrategy #HospitalInnovation #HealthTechStrategy CliniComp.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Ari Vojdani, Chief Scientific Officer at Cyrex Labs, describes the two primary components of the immune system--humoral and cell-mediated immunity and how the Cyrex diagnostics are designed to measure both. The Cyrex food immune reactivity testing measures antibodies against raw, cooked, modified, and processed food proteins as the structure of these proteins can change and affect immune responses. Cyrex is also developing tests to measure antibodies against various gut bacteria, fungi, and toxins, and how these relate to autoimmune conditions. Ari explains, "Cyrex performs lots of tests, but we can divide them based on the immune system. As you know, the immune system has two major components, the humoral and cell-mediated immunity. The humoral components of the immune system deal with measurements of antibodies. So when we get exposed to certain antigens, proteins of pathogens, food, or toxic chemicals, when they bind to human tissue, our body reacts to them, and the end result of that is specific antibody production against that specific protein or antigen." "The second component of the immune system is cell-mediated immunity, which looks at different lymphocytes, their markers, such as whether it is a T-cell, B-cell, CD4, CD8, T helper 1, T helper 2, regulatory T cells, or natural killer cells. So that also could be abnormal in certain inflammatory and autoimmune disorders. That's why at Cyrex, the tests that they are performing are classified based on humoral and cell-mediated immunity." "In 1986 and 1987, I developed the ELISA method for measuring antibodies against different food antigens. Then I did not have the knowledge about the importance of raw versus cooked or raw versus modified foods. I established the methodologies, and many others came to visit my laboratories. Years later, they started their own laboratories. So they continue using the same raw food for measuring antibodies in their own laboratories." #CyrexLabs #FunctionalImmunology #FunctionalMedicine #immuneHealth #FoodSensitivity #FoodAllergies cyrexlabs.com Download the transcript here

Kevin Freeman, Chief Commercial Officer at Health Catalyst, highlights the challenges mid-market healthcare systems are currently facing, including the predicted impact of Medicaid cuts and the increase in uninsured patients. There is a need to break down data silos and use AI and data analytics to improve the quality of care, reduce costs, and address clinician burnout. The Health Catalyst platform is designed to integrate existing technology, improve efficiency, and provide expertise and support to drive better patient outcomes and manage financially sound organizations. Kevin explains, "Health Catalyst works with healthcare providers, really of all sizes. Historically, more academics and IDNs, but more recently, over the last six to seven months, have really focused on the mid-market health systems. Mid-market health systems still struggle with some of the same issues that large health systems do, but they lack the technology, expertise, and some of the clinical experience that drive outcomes. So, we're really excited to move into the mid-market, improve quality and patient care, and reduce costs at the same time." "Our goal is not to rip and replace, but to meet them where they're at. Those investments that they've made, we can take those investments, integrate them into our platform, and drive those outcomes—that outcome improvement strategy across the entire system. I think that one of the biggest things we're seeing is that the technology is just not enough. Dashboards aren't enough. It really takes driving those outcomes and having that clinical expertise. But we don't just bring the technology. We bring the people with the technology to actually partner with them hand-in-hand to actually drive that outcome improvement." #HealthCatalyst #MidMarketHospitals #Hospitals #Healthcare #MedicaidCuts #HealthcareProviders healthcatalyst.com Download the transcript here

Nick Nunez, a strategy and solutions engineer at RevSpring, discusses the significant staffing shortages and technology vendor fragmentation that hamper the healthcare revenue cycle teams. RevSpring is addressing these issues by providing integrated analytics that function seamlessly with existing workflows and various dashboards, helping to prioritize work and eliminate inefficiencies. AI tools are being designed to support the financial and administrative aspects of healthcare, automating certain functions, augmenting human staff, and improving the quality of vendor and patient financial engagement. Nick explains, "RevSpring has a fairly broad footprint inside of the healthcare revenue cycle ecosystem here, and we support everyone from large health systems, IDNs, these integrated delivery networks, academic medical centers, to specialty clinics and smaller managed care organizations. We also have a footprint, actually, within our early out or bad debt vendors in healthcare. So we really do get an opportunity to see the full lifecycle of revenue even outside the walls of the originating health systems." "There are a couple of things that we've really started to focus on. We've been in the game for a long time doing things like statements, print and mail, and that is still important. So you asked the question about paper on day-to-day operations. I don't see as much about it, but paper statements out the door is still a need and sometimes an obligation that health systems have. And so we've done a lot to actually invest in giving analytics and insight to make sure that we are sending only the amount of statements via mail that are necessary to drive yield, drive down costs from postage by knowing this patient responds better to a text message versus a digital outreach versus print." #RevSpring #Ai #RevenueCycle #InspiringAction #PatientPathway #PatientFinance revspringinc.com Download the transcript here

Michael Palladino, VP of Sales and Clinical Solutions at OptimizeRx, is utilizing AI to educate patients and providers, promoting shared decision-making about which medications are most likely to yield the best health outcomes. The goal is to combat information overload by precisely targeting education to specific patients and delivering that information on the patient's preferred media delivery platform. Technology-driven nudges deliver timely information, reminders about upcoming appointments, and address medication adherence issues. Michael explains, "So OptimizeRx is a health technology company. We partner with the life sciences industry, and we help patients get on the right drug at the right time, educating both patient and provider. And we do that through some traditional methods of point-of-care. We also use our AI technology, which we will talk a little bit about today." "We've evolved as a company to be as individualized as possible, and that really has been using the technological advances of AI and machine learning over the past three years to predict in a patient journey when they may qualify for a procedure or drug, and educating both the patient and the HCP. So, it's really the use of data and technology that has evolved, and it's how we're leveraging our expertise in the space." "Traditionally, the way that a pharmaceutical industry may work or a life science manufacturer may work is they're often quite siloed. The patient gets some type of education on TV, the HCP somewhere in the country gets a similar type of education, and there's not a lot of synergy. What we have done in the marketplace is combine the patient's finding with the HCP's finding, and we educate them at the right time." #OptimizeRx #PrecisionMedicine #HealthTech #AI #HealthAI #DrugInformation optimizerx.com Download the transcript here

Jim LaRoe, CEO of Symphion, highlights an often overlooked cybersecurity threat posed by network-connected printers in a hospital setting. Modern printers are complex devices with numerous features that create vulnerabilities and potential access points to patient and hospital data for cybercriminals, yet they are generally managed outside of the IT security environment. The first step in ensuring printer security is to determine the number of printing devices on the network, their locations, and their configurations. Additionally, it is essential to ask the IT team to demonstrate security hygiene for the entire printer fleet. Jim explains, "We personally were exposed to the print industry in about 2015. And we noticed that the printers are really essential for patient care. They process, store, and transmit the most sensitive data, but they have grown up outside of the information security and supply chain. The security has been left vulnerable. In today's cybercrime growth industry climate, where opportunistic criminals are looking for opportunities to steal data, ransom, or attack patient care, you've got a real recipe for disaster. So really, we're facing a whole lot of issues that relate to the vulnerability of the printer." "They're absolutely very complex business machines, and the manufacturers for the last 40 years or so, from what you're talking about, the analog days, have really enriched them with incredible features beyond the camera, the document sorter, and things like that. They built in incredible web server features, email servers, fax servers, FTP servers, like a Dropbox that we all use for heavy payload communication protocols. They built all those features into the devices, and they built in ways to secure those features, but they haven't been used, and they're not being used on networks." #Symphion #Hospitals #PrinterSecurity #Cybercrimes #NetworkSecurity symphion.com Download the transcript here

Sinan Gölhan, Founder and CEO of GelTech, describes the characteristics and applications for hydrogels, which are bio-friendly, super-absorbent materials similar to natural tissue. In cancer treatments, hydrogels offer a way to deliver chemotherapy drugs directly to a tumor, which can significantly increase the accuracy and efficacy of the drug. GelTech has developed a robotic instrument to streamline the time-consuming testing process for new hydrogel treatments, automating repetitive actions, reducing inconsistencies, and enabling 24/7 testing capabilities. Sinan explains, "You could think of hydrogels like sponges. They're super absorbent, bio-friendly materials that are made of water. For this reason, scientists like myself essentially consider them the next best thing to natural tissue. Just like our own bodies, they're mostly made up of water. They have great applications in drug delivery, implant cosmetics, all these modern hydrogel face masks, and other types of substances." "I worked in hydrogel research for many years after seeing my mother and both my grandmothers go through chemotherapy treatments. I became motivated to make these treatments more effective, smarter, more targeted, and hydrogel-like. I just realized the main limitation is that to even make one of these treatments, it costs the company around a billion dollars over 10 years to figure out if this hydrogel is even going to work. And most of this was due to manual testing. It's scientists doing the same tests over and over again. It's very tedious, takes a long time, and it's very expensive to get a scientist to do this all day, every day. After feeling like a robot during the same test over and over again, I said, ‘I want to build a robot that automates this.' The company I was working for loved it and I essentially started focusing on that for the rest of my career." #GelTech #Hydrogels #Robots #ResearchRobotics #Cancer #CancerTreatments geltechlabs.com Download the transcript here

Elizabeth Jeffords, CEO and President of Iolyx Therapeutics, discusses dry eye disease and its connection to autoimmune conditions. The company's novel therapeutic topical immune modulator is designed to treat the root inflammation in the eye, which systemic drugs often fail to reach due to the blood-retina barrier. Patients with dry eye disease often have multiple comorbidities and are excluded from clinical trials, making this research even more significant in finding treatments for a growing population. Elizabeth explains, "Some people have physical dry eye, i.e., they have a dysfunction in their meibomian glands, and they can't make enough tears or those tears aren't the right composition. But more than half of the patients with dry eye have an underlying autoimmune disease. And they might know that, and they might not. So, patients with either Sjogren's disease or any of the thyroid conditions, patients with rheumatoid arthritis, MS, connective tissue dysfunction, most of those patients have some ocular comorbidities, and specifically, dry eye is probably one of the biggest ones." "Sometimes we treat the body, and we can treat autoimmune diseases successfully, but you don't really get most drugs into the eye. And so those alarm bells are still going off in the eye. And unfortunately, these patients with autoimmune disease tend to have more severe disease. They respond differently to the drugs that are out there today and probably most troublesome to us, and why Iolyx is really targeted these patients is that they get excluded from most of trials because they're just more difficult to treat, but they're also more difficult to treat because they have systemic medications that they're on, and most of those drugs get excluded." #IolyxTherapeutics #DryEyeDisease #Ophthalmology #AutoimmuneDisease #EyeCare #ImmunoOphthalmology #ClinicalTrials Iolyx.com Download the transcript here

Gene Mack, CEO and President of Gain Therapeutics, is combining AI-powered drug discovery with the development of allosteric modulators, drugs that bind to unique sites on proteins. The company's AI platform, Magellan, is crucial for accelerating drug discovery by reducing the time for computational screening of potential drug compounds. Their lead compound is showing promising results as a potential disease-modifying therapy for Parkinson's disease, aiming to halt the progression of the disease rather than just treating symptoms. Gene explains, "So allosteric modulators of protein, it's a bit of a word salad, but what we're trying to achieve here is finding unique binding sites on proteins that are sort of away from the active site of that protein." "So, a lot of physics calculations go into these binding site calculations. The idea is to complete these quickly during the screening of hundreds or thousands of compounds. This process takes 10 to 15 minutes to run a set of computations and determine if a particular molecule is a fit for a specific protein. If that takes 10 or 15 minutes per compound, it's not a very big deal to go to that library if you need to get through billions, trillions of those compounds, and you need that computational speed to really fire up." "We are able to speed up those calculations from, let's say, 10 minutes to milliseconds. You can screen through much larger numbers of compounds and potentially even construct new molecules that are not known to the public domain, which would be a real key innovation." "What we think we have in our lead program, which is GT-02287, another molecule that was discovered through our application of Magellan. What we hope we have in GT-02287 is a disease-modifying approach to Parkinson's. Up until now, the only available treatments for Parkinson's are really just focused on the symptoms and allaying the severity of the symptoms." #Parkinsons #ParkinsonsDisease #AI #DrugDiscovery #GAINtherapeutics #DiseaseModification gaintherapeutics.com Download the transcript here

Paul Howe, COO of Protega Pharmaceuticals, is focused on how abuse-deterrent technology can address the opioid crisis and the need for mandates for insurance coverage of safer abuse-deterrent formulations. The SentryBond technology was specifically designed for immediate-release opioids to make it difficult to manipulate pills for abuse via crushing, inhaling, or injecting. Protega partnered with software company Opus to offer a program that helps educate chronic pain patients, manage their treatment, and provides physicians with risk stratification data to improve care and reduce the likelihood of abuse. Paul explains, "Most importantly from our standpoint is to protect from the risk of misuse, abuse, and diversion, which is escalation from orally taking medications to crushing, inhaling, injecting, or smoking. Unfortunately, when that escalation happens, many times patients end up on illicit fentanyl and heroin through the black market. So what we're trying to do is stop that escalation through our abuse deterrent technology and our medication. It's called SentryBond abuse deterrent technology, the company's Protega Pharmaceuticals." "We also have a software program that we're now offering to physicians that deal and work with a lot of patients with chronic pain that really helps patients with chronic pain understand how to treat their pain and also titrate down off medications when possible, or at least get on the lowest possible dose and try multimodal care, try other types of avenues of procedures, different things they can do to help with their chronic pain." #ProtegaPharmaceuticals #PainManagement #ChronicPain #OpioidAbuse #OpioidPolicy #AbuseDeterrent. protegapharma.com Download the transcript here

Dr. George Magrath, CEO of Opus Genetics, discusses the company's experience in obtaining non-dilutive funding for its ultra-rare inherited retinal disease program. He highlights the challenges and advantages of this funding source, as well as the importance of establishing relationships with patient advocacy groups and foundations to mitigate risk and increase their attractiveness to traditional investors. The drive for non-dilutive funding for ultra-rare diseases is expected to become increasingly important in helping to get drugs to clinical trials. George explains, "Opus Genetics is a gene therapy company for eye disorders that occur in children. And these disorders are ultra-rare. It's 200 patients, a thousand patients per indication, and it's really good science. It's from Gene Bennett, who was the inventor of Luxturna, which was the first approved genetic medicine. And it does require some non-conventional thought on the financing, though, because these are so rare. And what we've done at Opus Genetics and have been really fortunate to be a part of is non-diluted funding from external sources. And that comes in the form of partnerships with patient families and organizations, like we just announced last week with RDH 12 Alliance." " It also comes with the Foundation Fighting Blindness, which has given us a number of grants and non-dilutive funding deals. And so those have been really important to Opus and have really helped us progress the programs. The way we think about that is the first principle is the clinical data we typically generate using our equity dollars. The preclinical work we try to do with non-dilutive funding, and that way we're able to focus on spending in rare scenarios." #OpusGenetics #RareDiseases #UltraRareDiseases #EyeDiseases #GeneTherapy #NonDilutiveFunding #Blindness #Ophthalmology opusgtx.com Download the transcript here

Lindsay Mateo is the Chief Commercial Officer at Weave Bio. This company has developed a platform to automate and streamline the regulatory documentation process for FDA submission for pharmaceutical and biotech companies. The regulatory lifecycle for drug development currently involves data from various sources in digital and paper formats. Weave Bio's tools are designed to automate and streamline administrative aspects of the regulatory process and create a living digital record of the development of the drug, which supports collaboration and saves time. Lindsay explains, "I look at the regulatory life cycle for any given drug program, and experts are at the core of that. Those experts, who are scientists, strategists, and project managers, essentially put all the work into the documentation that goes to regulators like the FDA here in the US. And that information goes on to allow this drug to continue through various stages of development to ultimately get to market and obviously help patients." "That is everything from early studies looking at how drugs are being handled in animals, in mice and rats, all the way through to clinical development. We start to get into humans and then again out through what gets drugs to market and even post-market expansion of various labels. So this is critical to getting any therapy to any patient with any condition. The process itself, the challenge with the process is that it's manual." #Weave #WeaveBio #Pharma #Biopharma #WeavePlatform #AINative #AutoCT #AutoND #FDASubmission #RegulatoryDocumentation Weave.bio Download the transcript here

Aspen Noonan, CEO of Elevate Holistics, a company that helps patients obtain medical marijuana cards through a telehealth consultation with licensed doctors. The qualifications for obtaining a medical marijuana card vary by state, and Elevate Holistics helps patients navigate the regulatory landscape. Many doctors are hesitant to recommend cannabis due to the federal illegality and restrictions from employers, and Elevate Holistics is filling the gaps by connecting patients looking for alternative treatments for conditions such as anxiety, depression, PTSD, and chronic pain. Aspen explains, "We are a one-stop shop for getting your online medical marijuana card. We connect doctors with patients 100% online in over 18 states to go through the process, which basically means book your appointment, fill out forms, join a video chat, call, and check for your emails because it's a hands-off experience. We really help people. I say A to Z, we don't just see you and get out. We ensure that your state application is filed correctly, so you ca your medical card at the end of the day." "You have every right to ask your primary care provider for a medical marijuana recommendation. The problem is, and the reason we started, is that a lot of doctors do not want to sign their name next to something that says cannabis. They aren't allowed to go through their clinics. Let's say they work at a hospital, they work at a big organization, and they're not allowed to attach their name to the cannabis industry. And so that's where we come in and just take patients, take a provider, put them together." #ElevateHolistics #Marijuana #Cannabis #MedialMarijuana #MedicalMarijuanaCard elevate-holistics.com Download the transcript here