Empowered Patient Podcast

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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