Empowered Patient Podcast

Paul Cataford is the Interim CEO and President of Titan Medical Inc. which is bringing advancements to single-port or single incision robotic-assisted surgery. This differs from multiple ports where a number of incisions are made, and different tools are inserted into the different ports. Titan is moving all of the tools like the camera, a needle driver, grasper, and shearers through a single access point thanks to innovations in robotics, miniaturization, computing power, and visualization techniques. Paul elaborates, "Well, as you can well imagine, what multiport means, you have multiple incisions around the abdomen or around the surgical work area. Every time you create a new point of entry, you create a new opportunity for infection. So, you have a new wound that needs to heal. You have a new scar, there's further risk of hitting something without intention, as you have multiple incisions. Less sites mean less pain, so a single incision has big benefits to the patient." "So the patient is the real benefic

Sheetal Parmar is the Head of Clinical Services at Natera, a clinical genetic testing company. She draws on her experience as a prenatal genetic counselor to address the need for more accurate and available non-invasive prenatal genetic testing.  This kind of information can guide women and their care teams and can also help emotionally prepare families. Sheetal looks forward to seeing more genetic markers being used to identify other types of pregnancy health. Sheetal explains, "People want to know, what are all the different options of testing? You can want to know as little information as possible or no information, all the way to "I want all the testing that could possibly be available for me or for the pregnancy." I think those are the type of questions that come up. Or "I have this in my family history. Will this test help me with that?" We want to make sure the right test is ordered based on the information that's needed for that patient based on their values and their beliefs, and what they want to kn

Dr. David Dyer is the Chief Retina Specialist for Alimera Sciences, a publicly-traded company specializing in the development and commercialization of prescription ophthalmology treatments for the management of retinal diseases. Having high blood sugar over time can damage the retinal blood vessels that bring nutrients to the retina, creating diabetic retinopathy. Alimera has developed a delivery platform to inject their drug Iluvien into the eye to treat the resulting diabetic macular edema. David explains, "So with retinal diseases, you're usually talking about diseases within the nerve fiber layer of the retina, the retinal vessels, or in the tissue that is underneath the retina that supports some of the retinal function. And that includes diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, vein occlusions, sometimes you can get detachments of the retina, and there are many other disorders, but those are the most common." "The treatment for diabetic macular edema typically involves injecting medications into the e

Dr. Justin Norden is a Partner at GSR Ventures, a healthcare technology-focused venture fund investing in early-stage companies that are leveraging emerging technology to drive transformative changes in healthcare for all patients.   Justin explains, "Digital health has been, I think, a long journey for companies really trying to find things that we know should work, that we've seen work in other aspects of business where technologies really transformed how we do things. Even though that technology has been possible, it really hasn't touched healthcare until many would argue, very recently." "Many companies that came in, either starting around 2010 or even through 2015, were a lot of the similar ideas that we're seeing today, there just wasn't the adoption. We didn't see patients being ready to adopt these technologies. Largely, even though some patients tried to adopt them, the providers weren't ready, providers weren't ready to deal with that data or willing to connect or spend time with the patients using

Micha Breakstone is the CEO and Co-Founder of NeuraLight and points out the lack of objective and sensitive evaluation measures available to diagnose neurological diseases like multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's.  Currently, evaluations using short questionnaires, visual observations, and self-reported behavior are further influenced by biases of the physician. NeuraLight is developing an approach that focuses on using images of the eye to produce objective, repeatable measures of disease progression. Micha elaborates, "We look at over 100 parameters at once, and we capture these by standard videos or anything from a webcam to a mobile phone. And we've developed a quite unique technology that marries, on the one hand, a kind of standard machine learning. But on the other hand, something that is entirely unique to us which is signal processing. So the ability to basically bring technologies that are available for satellites, in super-resolution, bring them down to earth into mobile phones in orde

Jesús Martin-Garcia is the CEO of GeNeuro, a Swiss-based clinical stage company focused on novel approaches for treating autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases.  While previously considered junk DNA, human endogenous retroviruses are now being seen in a new light as they represent 8% of human DNA and play a role in locking viral reproduction. Jesús explains, "Our mission is really to focus on and to defeat neurodegenerative diseases. We have an original approach, and we believe because we are based on leveraging the biology of human endogenous retroviruses, which are the traces that are left in our DNA by the virus contaminations that affected our ancestors. We believe they play a major role in neurodegenerative diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, ALS, and now recent data has shown, long-COVID." "Yes, that was frankly a surprise for us. It was a discovery led by some academic groups in the US and Europe that showed that SARS-CoV-2, remember I told you at the beginning, this interaction between exogenous

Steve Palma is the President of Medical Cost Solutions at Goodroot and we talk about what medical billing errors have to do with increasing healthcare costs. Steve also shines a light on hospital financial assistance programs and how they are not being used enough to help patients pay high medical bills. Steve provides some details, "Well, the billing errors include the cost of payers overpaying or underpaying claims, and the cost to the providers in billing correctly and then dealing with all the administrative headaches around audits by payers, and getting that claim ultimately right. These add a tremendous amount of administrative cost on both sides. It ends up getting passed to the consumer." "You'll hear some people on the health plan side say it's all abusive provider billing practices, whether it's fraud or potentially maximizing coding in a complex coding environment. On the provider side, often, they'll say it's health plans intentionally underpaying or playing their own types of games." "I think, ov

Dr. John Dobak is the President and CEO of DermTech which is leading the genomic revolution in dermatology to more accurately determine the presence of skin cancer. Their noninvasive platform changes the protocol for assessing a suspicious mole from visual review and surgically removing tissue to genomic analysis and using broader objective data before treatment is determined.  John elaborates, "Genomics is fundamentally changing the way medicine is practiced, and it is particularly changing cancer care and how cancer is detected and treated. We're really bringing that revolution to the dermatologist. We do that with our noninvasive genomics platform. We have something called the Smart Sticker, which is a special adhesive patch that can collect the sample of the skin noninvasively. And it feels a lot like scotch tape, you just press it on the skin, and you lift it off. And from that skin sample, the tissue we've collected, we can run a variety of genomic analyses, and that allows us to determine whether or no

Tom Isett is the CEO of iBio which is pioneering the next generation of biopharmaceuticals. Their goal is to reduce the cost, time, and risk of failure involved with drug discovery and development by using a plant-based recombinant protein manufacturing platform to create small and large batches of desired proteins. Tom shares his career journey from working with the USDA to iBio where he is back to working with the little leafy green guys again. Tom explains, "We are a biotech, so we're a developer of biopharmaceuticals, specifically focused in oncology, fibrosis, and infectious diseases, where we're really trying to address some of the bigger unmet medical needs out there. But what I think really makes us unique is how we develop these new medicines, molecules, and candidates. We use plants to produce these new drug candidates." "And as we move forward, we also use artificial intelligence for the design of the molecules. So the combination of the two winds up putting us in the position where we have this re

Paula Ragan is the CEO and President of X4 Pharmaceuticals, which focuses on the rare disease WHIM Syndrome. Patients have a deficiency in their immune system, and as a result, this diminishes their ability to fight chronic infections, and they have a higher risk for severe cancers. Paula explains, "If one thinks about doing the right test, it's easy to diagnose, and the right test is doing genetic sequencing. There are commercially available panels, so it exists for the patient and physician communities. The current challenge is getting the physicians to recognize the test is needed. And then to also enable payment. X4 has done a great job in providing free testing through our PATH4WARD program." "Our lead candidate is called mavorixafor, and it's an oral once-daily capsule. And the amazing thing is its mechanism. What it does is binds to a receptor called CXCR4. And it basically shuts it down a little bit. It's kind of blunting the signaling that normally exists in the cell. And for these patients with WHIM

Dr. Luca Benatti is the CEO of EryDel, a biotech company developing and commercializing cell-therapy treatments for rare diseases using autologous red blood cell encapsulation technology to deliver drugs. With a focus on the rare genetic disease Ataxia Telangiectasia (AT), Erydel has just completed a multi-center, multi-national phase III trial for the disease. Their symptomatic treatment has been shown to delay the progression of the disease and could be part of a regular immunoglobulin therapy session for these patients. Luca explains, "The first characteristic of our technology since there are similar technologies that utilize red blood cells to deliver therapeutics, is that we are the only one that has developed a technology that can work at the bedside. So, it's really the only one that can use the patient's blood, and we don't need to have a centralized lab. The beauty of this technology is that it is the only one that can use a sustained release formulations technology - that is, the one that is actual

Eliav Shaked, CEO, and Catherine Bornbaum, Head of Clinical Operations and Partnerships at RetiSpec are using hyperspectral retinal imaging to find more accurate and earlier biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases. As part of a regular eye exam, this non-invasive test can be administered by an ophthalmologist or optometrist using existing retinal cameras with the data being analyzed using AI to identify unique molecule signatures. Eliav explains, "What's unique about hyperspectral imaging or specifically hyperspectral retinal imaging is the fact that it's a tool that measures different coloring of elements in a much more detailed way. So, while we humans are limited to seeing and interpreting only three colors, hyperspectral retinal imaging can cover more than a hundred different colors in a very precise way. And it's really our way to get much more content from the back of the eye. And what RetiSpec is doing with that data is we're integrating our very own artificial intelligence that allows us to recognize

Dr. Sam Asgarian is the Chief Medical Officer of Scipher Medicine which is predicting drug response with precision immunology by building on the work of the Human Genome Project. Now that the human genome has been mapped, the next challenge is how to turn that information into use cases that are applicable in treating specific diseases. Sam explains, "The goal for us is to figure out which part, very specifically, of the autoimmune system is overacting and analyze that through a simple blood sample. We can take the blood in just a simple lab draw, just like other blood work, and analyze areas of perturbation or areas where the immune system specifically is overacting. That gives the physician enough to then treat it with a prescription that focuses only on that specific area which, of course, in the immune system is critically important because it's still serving a very important goal of protecting that person against disease. You don't want to shut down the overall immune system. You just want to quiet the a

Sunny Jain is the Founder and CEO of Floré by Sun Genomics and is driven to better understand the microbe cells that live inside of our intestinal tract and all around our body.  With a history of working at Illumina, Sunny is studying the DNA from those cells, the microbiome, to understand their function and how they contribute to our overall health. Sunny explains, "Sun Genomics has created the world's only precision probiotic, And it utilizes AI, DNA sequencing, biome chromatics, and e-health technology. Our technology helps us build the largest database of microbiomes that are sequenced via metagenomics, or whole genome sequencing, to understand the modulatory effects or the changing effects that food ingredients and probiotics can have for 80 plus million Americans that suffer from gut health issues every year." "So, you truly are unique, from a gut microbiome perspective. Our human DNA is 99.9 percent similar. So, we're very identical from a human DNA perspective. But the DNA from microbes of the gut, y

Tim Clackson is the President and CEO of Theseus Pharmaceuticals which has a mission to outsmart cancer resistance by developing pan-variant tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) that are designed to hit different types of cancer cell mutations. The goals of the therapy are to delay treatment resistant cancer as well as effectively deal with the variety of cancer mutations once they have occurred. Tim explains, "The unfortunate truth is that nearly all types of tumors at some point are going to develop resistance. We are at this stage now where some tumors that are caught early can be really cured and go into long-term remission. Still, there's a substantial portion of tumor types and certainly those that are caught a little bit later that unfortunately show an almost inevitable evolution of resistance. So, then the challenge becomes, can you delay how long that resistance takes to emerge? And then can you come up with therapies or approaches that will hopefully substantially prolong the post resistance treatment

Dr. John Krakauer is the Chief Medical Advisor at MindMaze, pioneers in digital neurotherapeutics focused on brain health and recovery from neurological diseases and injuries. John explains, "What we really mean by digital neurotherapeutics is the belief that one can actually administer a medicine in a way that's different from pharmacology, different from surgery or devices. But in fact, consider software as a pill so that you can actually have a software experience, an immersive gaming-like experience that can actually have an effect on a disease, in particular, neurological conditions in a way comparable to other medical approaches." "So MindMaze really would like to create immersive gaming software that allows the nervous system after injury or disease to undergo such change. We're different, I think, in so much that we realize that you can't just be an app on a phone or a tablet. You have to be in an immersive full-body experience that combines exercise, cognitive challenge, and skill learning. And so, w

Emee Baldwin, Founder of Poppy's Purpose, is a nursing student and patient advocate with a success story about getting the attention of care providers and elected officials to re-evaluate the rules regarding patient visitation rights, particularly in the age of COVID-19. Emee and her family worked with their local representatives to make a law in Alabama where no patient will be alone every day.  Emee elaborates, "So, last November, November of 2020, my grandfather, known to me as Poppy, was diagnosed with COVID-19. This was new to us, and it was new to everyone at the time. But to start with the background story, I was used to seeing my Poppy every single day. I grew up on a small family farm, so we were very close. If I didn't see him every day, I at least heard from him every day, so when he was first admitted to the hospital with COVID-19, that first week, he was just on a regular floor up here in Huntsville, Alabama, which is where I live and where I go to school. So it was really odd being two miles awa

Hamid Khoja is the Chief Scientific Officer of FibroBiologics which is developing regenerative medicine using fibroblasts which are one of the most abundant cells in the human body. While stem cell therapy has gotten significant attention, fibroblasts are easier to source and grow. Hamid elaborates, "Just to give you a sense of some of the capabilities of fibroblasts. They behave very similarly in many aspects to stem cells, which we're very well aware of. What makes fibroblasts significantly interesting for us and for therapeutic purposes is that they can also differentiate into many different cell types." "So the CybroCell is the product name that we've given our tolerogenic fibroblasts, cells that have been specifically cultured for use in degenerative disc disease. But we've also tested this same product in a clinical trial for multiple sclerosis. So we have done limited trials for safety for both degenerative disc disease and multiple sclerosis, and the results have been very promising." #FibroBiologics

Scott Gray is the President and CEO of Clincierge with a mission to support participants in clinical trials, particularly for patients with rare diseases. Since many rare diseases require a patient caregiver to accompany a trial participant, Clincierge also manages the logistics for both of those people. The result of these patient-centric efforts is greater diversity in recruitment, higher retention rates, and higher participant satisfaction. Scott explains, "The purpose for Clincierge is to improve clinical trial performance by improving the patient experience. Depending upon the disease state, different patients require different types of support to enable them to participate in a clinical trial. It may be a geographic location for a family so that a pediatric patient can participate in a trial. It may be language barriers, so we provide interpreters. Along with that relocation may come the need for housing that's funded, prepaid, meal stipends, ground transportation, visa services." "So what we do is look

Sandy Macrae Ph.D. is the CEO of Sangamo Therapeutics which has a unique technology called zinc finger. This allows them to find and modify a particular DNA either to delete a faulty gene or to help enhance one that isn't producing enough or turn one down when it's producing too much. While currently focusing on rare diseases like hemophilia, Sangamo is also moving into treating neurodegenerative diseases, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, and kidney transplants with genomic medicine and cell therapy. Sandy explains, "Sangamo has been at the forefront of genomic medicine for 26 years now, and the world has changed so much and is now embracing genomic medicines as one of the key parts of the tools that we have to address serious diseases." "I think in the future, there'll be three kinds of medicines. There will be the medicines you take or inject, there'll be the vaccines that prevent disease, and then there'll be genomic medicines that will help solve some of the long problems from our genomic D