Empowered Patient Podcast

Bronwyn Spira, CEO and Co-Founder at Force Therapeutics, allows provider groups, physical therapists, doctors, and nurses to reach out to patients no matter where they are, using virtual tools to expand access to care. Experience during the pandemic demonstrated that patients of all ages are eager to use digital means to address pain and recovery issues on their own time. Virtual orthopedic care also enables providers to be more efficient and helps to address staff shortages and burnout.

Bronwyn explains, "Physical therapy that's involved in treating orthopedic conditions is a much healthier way, and a non-opioid dependent way, of combating pain. But also the solution lies in understanding the data."

"A lot of the work that we've done has been around how our patients that are prescribed opioids are recovering differently from those who have an opioid-sparing pain protocol. Once you have that data, you can actually make a broader change to best-practice protocols. And, of course, that has an outsized impact on opioid dependence in a community."

"This can reach any patient, including patients in rural communities, patients who cannot afford their copays or their commuting costs, and even patients with mobility issues. Virtual care, when constructed in a way that's validated and delivered by the provider organization, overcomes many barriers to access to care but also provides better digital care in many cases."

#HealthEquity #HealthDisparities #DigitalHealth #DigitalCare #VirtualCare #PatientOutcomes #PhysicalTherapy #OrthopedicCare #Orthopedics #SDoH #Opioids #PatientEngagement #Telemedicine

forcetherapeutics.com

Listen to the podcast here

Bronwyn Spira, CEO and Co-Founder at Force Therapeutics, allows provider groups, physical therapists, doctors, and nurses to reach out to patients no matter where they are, using virtual tools to expand access to care. Experience during the pandemic demonstrated that patients of all ages are eager to use digital means to address pain and recovery issues on their own time. Virtual orthopedic care also enables providers to be more efficient and helps to address staff shortages and burnout.

Bronwyn explains, "Physical therapy that's involved in treating orthopedic conditions is a much healthier way, and a non-opioid dependent way, of combating pain. But also the solution lies in understanding the data."

"A lot of the work that we've done has been around how our patients that are prescribed opioids are recovering differently from those who have an opioid-sparing pain protocol. Once you have that data, you can actually make a broader change to best-practice protocols. And, of course, that has an outsized impact on opioid dependence in a community."

"This can reach any patient, including patients in rural communities, patients who cannot afford their copays or their commuting costs, and even patients with mobility issues. Virtual care, when constructed in a way that's validated and delivered by the provider organization, overcomes many barriers to access to care but also provides better digital care in many cases."

#HealthEquity #HealthDisparities #DigitalHealth #DigitalCare #VirtualCare #PatientOutcomes #PhysicalTherapy #OrthopedicCare #Orthopedics #SDoH #Opioids #PatientEngagement #Telemedicine

forcetherapeutics.com

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Akihiro Ko is the CEO and Co-Founder of Elixirgen Therapeutics, which was founded with the mission of treating patients using RNA technology. Their c-srRNA, controllable self-replicating RNA, technology is being applied to telomere biology disorders where patients have inherited short telomeres and a failure to develop bone marrow. Elixirgen is looking to restore the ability to create blood cells in patients suffering from this rare disease.

Akihiro explains, "We are harnessing the tremendous potential of our controlled self-replicating RNA technology to redefine stem cell therapies for patients using the ZSCAN4 gene. We are working on potentially groundbreaking treatments for difficult-to-treat, rare, and genetic diseases, starting with the hematopoietic system and then going out into more indications."

"And our unique technology is that it is controllable in that it is optimized for expression at 30-35 ℃ and inactivated at temperatures at and above 37 ℃. And what that enables us to do is basically tune the expression of this self-replicating RNA. What is great is that self-replicating RNA has been known for its very long and also basically strong expression. However, it has been uncontrolled. So, we bring that control with this unique temperature-controlled system."

"So telomere biology disorders are a group of known diseases, and they are defined by these patients having inherited short telomeres and accelerated shortening of those telomeres over time. It is a rare disease, and the most common issue for the patients is that by the age of 30, around 80% of them develop bone marrow failure, which is a very serious condition."

"What this bone marrow failure entails is that their hematopoiesis, their ability to create new blood cells from their bone marrow, decreases over time. The reason for that is that the telomeres in their hematopoietic stem cells are shorter, and this reduces their ability to do so."

@ElixirgenTx #CellTherapy #RareDiseases #Telomeres #TelomereBiologyDisorders #RNATechnology

Elixirgentherapeutics.com

Listen to the podcast here

Akihiro Ko is the CEO and Co-Founder of Elixirgen Therapeutics, which was founded with the mission of treating patients using RNA technology. Their c-srRNA, controllable self-replicating RNA, technology is being applied to telomere biology disorders where patients have inherited short telomeres and a failure to develop bone marrow. Elixirgen is looking to restore the ability to create blood cells in patients suffering from this rare disease.

Akihiro explains, "We are harnessing the tremendous potential of our controlled self-replicating RNA technology to redefine stem cell therapies for patients using the ZSCAN4 gene. We are working on potentially groundbreaking treatments for difficult-to-treat, rare, and genetic diseases, starting with the hematopoietic system and then going out into more indications."

"And our unique technology is that it is controllable in that it is optimized for expression at 30-35 ℃ and inactivated at temperatures at and above 37 ℃. And what that enables us to do is basically tune the expression of this self-replicating RNA. What is great is that self-replicating RNA has been known for its very long and also basically strong expression. However, it has been uncontrolled. So, we bring that control with this unique temperature-controlled system."

"So telomere biology disorders are a group of known diseases, and they are defined by these patients having inherited short telomeres and accelerated shortening of those telomeres over time. It is a rare disease, and the most common issue for the patients is that by the age of 30, around 80% of them develop bone marrow failure, which is a very serious condition."

"What this bone marrow failure entails is that their hematopoiesis, their ability to create new blood cells from their bone marrow, decreases over time. The reason for that is that the telomeres in their hematopoietic stem cells are shorter, and this reduces their ability to do so."

@ElixirgenTx #CellTherapy #RareDiseases #Telomeres #TelomereBiologyDisorders #RNATechnology

Elixirgentherapeutics.com

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Rich Parker, MD Chief Medical Officer at Arcadia, is working with large healthcare providers to provide data analytics to address the needs of large populations of patients and very specific groups facing unique challenges. The goal is to get the signal-to-noise ratio correct as quickly as possible to, for example, efficiently develop successful COVID vaccinations and identify which patients need help first in an emergency. More refined stratification of patients is also revealing at-risk patients who may have been missed in earlier analyses of social determinants of health.

Rich explains, "So the data comes from so many disparate sources that we need companies like Arcadia that aggregate data to do the work. The data is coming from claims from payers, the data is coming from electronic health records, data is coming from public sources, and data is coming from manufacturers of vaccines. So all that data has to be put together, aggregated, cleaned up, and then made usable for interpreting for clinical trials to determine whether a new vaccine is safe and effective."

"Every function within a hospital, every ambulatory healthcare function, it's all data-driven. And then, if we move over into the research world, and research often takes place within healthcare entities. Some of our customers, which are academic medical centers, have large research arms. They are involved with the National Institute of Health and the Center for Disease Control. So there's a lot of overlap between healthcare organizations, industry, the federal government, and state departments of health. We all have the same goals in mind, which is improving the health of the population. And all of those endeavors are data-driven."

@ArcadiaHealthIT #HealthOutcomes #PopHealth #PopulationHealth #SDoH #DataAnalytics #DataPlatform

arcadia.io

Listen to the podcast here

Rich Parker, MD Chief Medical Officer at Arcadia, is working with large healthcare providers to provide data analytics to address the needs of large populations of patients and very specific groups facing unique challenges. The goal is to get the signal-to-noise ratio correct as quickly as possible to, for example, efficiently develop successful COVID vaccinations and identify which patients need help first in an emergency. More refined stratification of patients is also revealing at-risk patients who may have been missed in earlier analyses of social determinants of health.

Rich explains, "So the data comes from so many disparate sources that we need companies like Arcadia that aggregate data to do the work. The data is coming from claims from payers, the data is coming from electronic health records, data is coming from public sources, and data is coming from manufacturers of vaccines. So all that data has to be put together, aggregated, cleaned up, and then made usable for interpreting for clinical trials to determine whether a new vaccine is safe and effective."

"Every function within a hospital, every ambulatory healthcare function, it's all data-driven. And then, if we move over into the research world, and research often takes place within healthcare entities. Some of our customers, which are academic medical centers, have large research arms. They are involved with the National Institute of Health and the Center for Disease Control. So there's a lot of overlap between healthcare organizations, industry, the federal government, and state departments of health. We all have the same goals in mind, which is improving the health of the population. And all of those endeavors are data-driven."

@ArcadiaHealthIT #HealthOutcomes #PopHealth #PopulationHealth #SDoH #DataAnalytics #DataPlatform

arcadia.io

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Tuvik Beker, CEO of Pangea Biomed, is looking for more accurate biomarkers for oncology to determine better who might benefit from a specific drug. Their ENLIGHT platform is a pan-cancer, pan-treatment response predictor and can be used to find the best patient populations to give a new drug. They are also working with bio-pharma companies on improving the identification of novel targets through better biomarkers, better patient stratification, and combination therapy optimization.

Tuvik elaborates, "Rather than looking at the genome and looking for abnormalities in gene coding, those rare fusions, or actionable mutations, what Pangea is doing is looking at the way genes are activated in the tumor."

"And this turns out to be a much, much more common abnormality in cancer tumor cells. So almost any tumor cell that you would examine, you would find hundreds and even thousands of genes that are normally encoded. So they have no mutations, they are wild-type genes, and yet they are abnormally expressed in the tumor compared with normal tissue. And the question is, of course, how do we harness this common abnormality of expression into effective therapies? So, there is where our technological uniqueness comes in."

"And that's really what we are hoping for in the long run because ENLIGHT is not only a way to say generally, qualitatively, whether a particular drug would be good or not. It can actually rank and compare different therapies in a way that gives the treating physician a very clear map of what the available treatments are and what should be considered or is the ultimate decision a clinical one. So we are just dealing with treatment elimination but in a very informed manner."

@BekerTuvik @PangeaBiomed #PrecisionMedicine #Oncology #PrecisionOncology #Biotech #Startup

pangeabiomed.com

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Tuvik Beker CEO of Pangea Biomed is looking for more accurate biomarkers for oncology to better determine who might benefit from a specific drug. Their ENLIGHT platform is a pan-cancer, pan-treatment response predictor and can be used to find the best patient populations to give a new drug. They are also working with bio-pharma companies on improving the identification of novel targets through better biomarkers, better patient stratification, and combination therapy optimization.

Tuvik elaborates, "Rather than looking at the genome and looking for abnormalities in gene coding, those rare fusions, or actionable mutations, what Pangea is doing is looking at the way genes are activated in the tumor."

"And this turns out to be a much, much more common abnormality in cancer tumor cells. So almost any tumor cell that you would examine, you would find hundreds and even thousands of genes that are normally encoded. So they have no mutations, they are wild-type genes, and yet they are abnormally expressed in the tumor compared with normal tissue. And the question is, of course, how do we harness this common abnormality of expression into effective therapies? So, there is where our technological uniqueness comes in."

"And that's really what we are hoping for in the long run because ENLIGHT is not only a way to say generally, qualitatively, whether a particular drug would be good or not. It can actually rank and compare different therapies in a way that gives the treating physician a very clear map of what the available treatments are and what should be considered or is the ultimate decision a clinical one. So we are just dealing with treatment elimination but in a very informed manner."

@BekerTuvik @PangeaBiomed #PrecisionMedicine #Oncology #PrecisionOncology #Biotech #Startup

pangeabiomed.com

Listen to the podcast here

Dr. Ira Spector is the CEO and Co-Founder of SFA Therapeutics, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company leading the way as a fourth-generation microbiome company to treat inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The first microbiome companies focused on fecal transplants, while the next innovation was probiotics. The third generation took the understanding of the bacteria in the GI microbiome to derive bacteria for each patient. SFA is asking what the bacteria make and their physiological function in order to synthetically make those substances as an effective small molecule drug.

Ira explains, "The immune system in the human body is regulated up and down by messengers called cytokines. And long before cytokine storm and COVID came about, we were researching how to control these signals in the body. In particular, what we found is that there are cytokines related to these autoimmune diseases. It turns out that when you do a review across a range of autoimmune diseases, you find the same four or five cytokines related to those diseases over and over and over again. And what we have found are substances normally made in the GI by bacteria that can be turned into drugs that regulate or modulate these immune system signals and return the immune system to normal."

"We believe that these have the potential to be used to treat a range of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Our analogy is just as insulin was revolutionary for Type 1 diabetics because they couldn't make sufficient insulin themselves, that patients with these diseases often lack the ability to make these substances. By providing them exogenously as a drug, we can take their immune system back to normal and reduce the inflammation associated with these autoimmune diseases."

@TherapeuticsSfa #SFATherapeutics #Microbiome #AutoimmuneDisease #Inflammation #Psoriasis #ImmuneSystem

sfatherapeutics.com

Listen to the podcast here

Dr. Ira Spector is the CEO and Co-Founder of SFA Therapeutics, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company leading the way as a fourth-generation microbiome company to treat inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The first microbiome companies focused on fecal transplants, while the next innovation was probiotics. The third generation took the understanding of the bacteria in the GI microbiome to derive bacteria for each patient. SFA is asking what the bacteria make and their physiological function in order to synthetically make those substances as an effective small molecule drug.

Ira explains, "The immune system in the human body is regulated up and down by messengers called cytokines. And long before cytokine storm and COVID came about, we were researching how to control these signals in the body. In particular, what we found is that there are cytokines related to these autoimmune diseases. It turns out that when you do a review across a range of autoimmune diseases, you find the same four or five cytokines related to those diseases over and over and over again. And what we have found are substances normally made in the GI by bacteria that can be turned into drugs that regulate or modulate these immune system signals and return the immune system to normal."

"We believe that these have the potential to be used to treat a range of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Our analogy is just as insulin was revolutionary for Type 1 diabetics because they couldn't make sufficient insulin themselves, that patients with these diseases often lack the ability to make these substances. By providing them exogenously as a drug, we can take their immune system back to normal and reduce the inflammation associated with these autoimmune diseases."

@TherapeuticsSfa #SFATherapeutics #Microbiome #AutoimmuneDisease #Inflammation #Psoriasis #ImmuneSystem

sfatherapeutics.com

Download the transcript here