Empowered Patient Podcast

Felicia Janovich is a founding member of the American IV Association, which advocates for safe and effective IV therapies, including hydration, vitamin infusions, and treatments to support patients with chronic conditions or undergoing chemotherapy. While there is limited research on the effectiveness of these IV therapies, AIVA is working to collect and analyze clinical data to understand better the impact these therapies might have on individuals to help with recovery and overall health. Felicia explains, "Right now, in our space, we struggle with clear guidelines. And there's kind of misunderstanding that there's a bunch of IV cowboys out there, and they're just starting IVs, and they don't have regulations. It's just entirely untrue. The IV Association and its members bring in this amazing opportunity to collaborate, not compete, which is huge within this IV industry because it is relatively new, so we need all the data, all the information, and all the science to back it up. What AIVA has done is welcom

Michael McFadden is the CEO of Alpha Cognition, a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing treatments for brain diseases such as Alzheimer's, ALS, and traumatic brain injury. Their drug ZUNVEYL, recently approved by the FDA, is an oral treatment for mild to moderate Alzheimer's that improves symptoms such as memory loss, mental processing speed, and mood changes. A key feature of the drug is fewer gastrointestinal side effects compared to other Alzheimer's drugs coming onto the market.   Michael explains, "ZUNVEYL is a class of medications known as acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. It’s the second oral compound approved by the FDA to treat Alzheimer’s disease in the last decade. So, it is a momentous accomplishment by our company, and it is an accomplishment that will serve patients and physicians well. It’s designed to treat symptoms of mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease that many patients suffer from. These are things like memory loss, mental health processing speed, ability to solve problems or re

George Pappas, CEO of Intraprise Health, works with various healthcare organizations across the healthcare industry and healthcare ecosystem to help address cybersecurity risks. While recent cyber attacks have raised awareness about the need for better cybersecurity measures, the complexity of healthcare IT systems creates significant challenges for comprehensive risk management. Proactive measures, including employee training, enhanced identity confirmation, and limiting access, are critical to mitigating the risk of cyber attacks.   George explains, "The net situation is that these large technology companies that serve healthcare and hospital systems and large medical practices change are clearinghouses, revenue cycle managers, and manage real-time price transparency. What medication management companies manage is so complicated, and they have so many ways that something can be attacked. As you mentioned at the beginning, the attackers are getting very clever and sharing a lot of their methods, so you have

Ketan Mehta, Founder and CEO of Tris Pharma, is focused on developing non-addictive pain medication. Their lead drug candidate is designed to be an effective pain drug without the respiratory-depressive and addictive side effects of traditional opioid drugs. This drug works by targeting the nociceptin receptor and has also shown promise to help curb cravings and dependence on opioids. The goal is to provide doctors and patients with a non-opioid pain medication option that can help reduce reliance on highly addictive prescription opioids.  Ketan explains, "Tris is focused on neuroscience-based products, especially CNS, at a high level. More specifically, we focused on ADHD and neurodevelopmental disorders and the products that treat them. And also, more recently, we have been more active in the pain space." "We're developing a drug, which is currently an investigational drug in Phase three clinical trials. It's called cebranopadol. And what we have seen is that it has an efficacy just on par with your typica

Beth Houck, Chief Executive Officer at SonarMD, works with payers and physician practices to provide proactive, value-based care for patients with chronic GI conditions. They use a digital platform to monitor self-reported patient symptoms and enable physicians to identify those patients that need attention. This approach aims to improve patient outcomes and reduce emergency room visits and hospitalizations.   Beth explains, "SonarMD manages patients with chronic gut health conditions, and specifically, we started with something called inflammatory bowel disease, which is the encompassing word for patients with Crohn's and ulcerative colitis. We develop a value-based contract with a payer, so somebody at risk for the cost of care of a patient, and then we bring that cost of care program to a physician's office. In collaboration with that physician, we manage a population of patients to have better outcomes for their chronic GI conditions." "We just talk about this as a shift to proactive care from reactive c

Dr. Chris Bouton, the Senior VP and Head of Artificial Intelligence at Certara, is exploring applying generative AI to drug discovery and development to improve efficiency and identify novel therapeutics across various use cases. The focus is on developing specialized secure AI models to integrate internal data with the Certara platform. Generative AI is particularly useful in areas with high specificity, such as antibody design and mRNA therapeutics, where modeling the underlying biology is crucial.  Chris explains, "Certara helps pharmaceutical and biotech companies throughout their process, from early basic research to regulatory filing and beyond. And we're quite a unique company in that we are not developing our own drugs but instead helping companies develop their drugs. And it's something like over 90% of all FDA approvals are projects that, in some way, shape, or form, Certara has helped with." "Our philosophy is to start with the use case. Generative AI is an incredible novel technology. There are m

David Happel is President and CEO of Sagimet Biosciences, a company developing drugs to treat metabolic diseases by targeting the underlying cause of fat accumulation in the liver. The drug denifanstat limits the activity of fatty acid synthase (FASN), an enzyme that regulates fat accumulation. This approach is a fat inhibitor, not a fat burner, the focus of other MASH drugs.  David explains, "Sagimet was founded back in 2007 as a private company with a group of medicinal chemists that had a particular target in mind, and this particular target was called fatty acid synthase, or FASN. FASN is a rather ubiquitous enzyme throughout the body that functions as a regulating enzyme in many organs. When FASN becomes overactive or overexpressed, it sort of throws things out of balance and, in particular, certain cardiometabolic diseases, such as MASH and in the liver. So, this group of chemists, in order to resolve this overactivity, developed a portfolio of FASN inhibitors, led by our lead program denifanstat, that

Dr. Gavin Magaha, Senior Director for External Affairs and Policy at Kalderos, describes the 340B drug discount program created in 1992 to help safety net healthcare providers obtain discounted drugs. Over time, this program has grown in complexity, and issues have arisen around duplicate discounts where Medicaid rebates are involved. The current 340B system makes it difficult for stakeholders to share data and lacks transparency. The Kalderos platform incorporates technology and AI and ML tools to address data sharing, validate claims, and prevent duplicate discounts.  Gavin explains, "Our platform primarily helps manufacturers. However, through the activities that we provide service for, we end up helping all stakeholders in a compliant manner or be more compliant with several different drug discount programs, primarily the intersection of the 340B and the Medicaid Drug Rebate programs. We work to help the states, the covered entities in the program, and the manufacturers. All come to a resolution of what'

Chris Hart, Co-Founder, CEO, and President of Creyon Bio, is focused on engineering drugs rather than just discovering them through serendipity and traditional methods.  Creyon is developing oligonucleotide medicines for rare and common diseases by applying AI and big data models of the molecular and genetic basis of diseases to develop safe and effective drugs more quickly.  Chris elaborates, "When we think about drug engineering versus drug discovery, we’re thinking about how we take this process that currently requires us to do trial-and-error identification of molecules that may be beneficial in the clinic to a place where we can say, can I build the right machinery, the right data, the right models, the right processes to go in and understand if I want to make this modulation within a cell, here’s the molecule that will do it and I can have confidence that it will be safe." "In terms of drug engineering and the type of drug engineering that Creyon does, what made starting Creyon the right thing to do and

Krystyna Houser is the Founder of mBIOTA Labs, a company that develops effective and tolerable elemental diets and medical foods for treating gastrointestinal disorders such as IBS, IBD, SIBO, IMO, and Crohn's disease. While short-term liquid elemental diets have been used in the past to treat GI conditions, the formulation has been very unpalatable, resulting in high patient non-compliance. The mBIOTA clinical trials have shown the elemental diet to be more effective than antibiotics in allowing the gut to recover.  Krystyna explains, "After battling my own GI issues and successfully treating them through a combination of an elemental diet and a dietary protocol called low-fermentation eating, I became a believer in the power of functional nutrition and built mBIOTA Labs to bring these solutions along with taste and a pleasant experience to millions of people suffering with GI conditions." "Elemental diets have been around for over 50 years. And through hundreds of clinical studies, elemental diets have bee

Dr. Ann Beliën, Chief Executive Officer and Founder at Rejuvenate Biomed, is addressing the underlying biology of aging including mechanisms like mitochondrial health, cell-cell communication and inflammation in order to promote healthy aging. Taking a combination therapy approach, Rejuvenate is using AI-enable drug discovery to address multiple pathways that are involved in aging. Their lead drug candidate is a treatment for sarcopenia with plans to assess impact on other age-related biomarkers. Ann explains, "The biology of aging indeed is being defined by 12 hallmarks. These 12 hallmarks are pathways where you see that the functioning is deteriorating. One of them is mitochondrial health. So, the mitochondria are there to create energy in your cells to make sure that they work to an optimal base. That’s a very important element that we need to address." "Another very important one for us is cell-cell communication. So, for instance, in sarcopenia, one of the diseases we study, it’s very important that you

Eric Olson, COO and Founder of BetterWay™ by Babson Diagnostics™, reports that traditional blood testing is often seen as inconvenient and unpleasant, causing 40% of people to avoid needed blood tests. Babson has developed a more patient-friendly approach to blood collection using a device that fits on the finger and requires a minimum amount of blood. The BetterWay service allows patients or doctors to order tests where blood is drawn at a local pharmacy and samples analyzed at a central lab, providing a quick turnaround with understandable test results.  Eric explains, "Blood testing is something that most people are very familiar with. It’s a routine part of medical care. Every time you go in for your annual visit or if you’re monitoring a disease, maybe a chronic disease, you might get tested more frequently than once a year. The experience is something that a lot of people go through, which consists of having an appointment, going into some sort of patient service center, and getting blood drawn by a pr

Marylyn Rigby, President and CEO of Bioceptive, focuses on improving women's health technologies. Bioceptive has developed a cervical suction retractor as an alternative to the 200-year-old cervical tenaculum device used to insert IUDs and perform biopsies and other intrauterine procedures. While current procedures are extremely painful, there has been a lack of innovation in understanding women's pain because women are often described as hysterical, with little clinical data to get to the source of the pain.   Marylyn explains, "I think that also has to do with what modern medicine is based on, which is a man’s body and not a woman’s body. And because of that, it’s kind of interesting to think that a man could ever possibly understand what it would feel like to have their cervix, which they don’t even have, be pierced, essentially. It is like having your ears pierced and the traumatic experience that it causes because this is done again without any type of anesthetic. So, one of the biggest issues that we s

Greg Sturmer, Co-Founder and CEO of Elysium Therapeutics, a company with expertise in reducing pain and addressing opioid use disorder and fatal overdose from fentanyl. Elysium has developed O2P, Oral Overdose Protection, a technology that aims to control the impact of opioids and reduce the risk of use disorder or a fatal overdose. SOOPR is a rescue agent designed specifically for overdoses from synthetic opioids, particularly fentanyl, which can last longer and be more potent than traditional opioids. Greg explains, "Anytime there’s an epidemic, you want to control exposure. The tricky bit in the area of pain management and the use of opioids is how do you control exposure without affecting patient care. We’ve come up with a technology that maintains the unmatched efficacy of the opioids. But when somebody takes too many pills, and we’ve actually shown this in our human study, we can reduce the exposure because we use this proprietary molecular delivery system that uses the body’s natural digestive process

Dr. Boris Reznik, Chairman and CEO of Immorta Bio, was founded to explore longevity and life extension technologies inspired by the discovery that aged cells can be reprogrammed to become younger ones. The company has a cellular rejuvenation platform that uses the patient's cells and senolytic immunotherapy to help the immune system target and remove senescent cells. These approaches aim to leverage the body's natural mechanism for maintaining health and extending the healthspan, not just lifespan. Boris explains, "First of all, let me just touch upon aging because aging perpetually happens on a cellular level from an early age because trillions of mutations occur in our cells every single day. But the young body’s defense mechanism, such as the immune system and stem cells, effectively addresses those issues and keeps young people healthy. So everything we do is associated with the approach where we try to use young bodies’ mechanisms in dealing with all diseases and all issues associated with aging."   "As

Randy Boldyga is the CEO, President, and Founder of RXNT, which provides electronic medical records, electronic prescribing, and practice management products. One primary focus is improving patient charts using AI tools to enable providers to communicate with patients more efficiently and effectively. Using predictive analytics and virtual health assistants, this approach can improve patient outcomes by making healthcare more personalized and proactive.  Randy explains, "There are things like enhanced diagnostics, in which AI can analyze medical images such as X-rays and MRIs with high accuracy, and personalized medicine, where AI can process and interpret genetic information, helping to tailor treatments to individual patients. There are predictive analytics, operational efficiencies such as AI, and streamlining administrative tasks for their office, such as scheduling, billing, and managing patient records." "There’s virtual health assistance where AI-powered chatbots and individual assistance can help wi

Joseph Mossel, CEO and Co-Founder of Ibex Medical Analytics is developing AI-based cancer diagnostic technology to help pathologists work faster and more accurately with tissue samples. This technology is being widely adopted as an artificial pathologist that can perform tasks more efficiently and aid the pathologist in reducing error rates, which is ever more important with the shortage of pathologists and increasing demand. Partnering with pharma companies, this technology has the potential to develop algorithms that can help determine the effectiveness of specific cancer drugs, expanding the application of AI beyond improving diagnostic accuracy. Joseph explains, "Pathology labs know how to receive a biopsy and a tissue sample and then convert it into a slide. Then, it is diagnosed by the pathologist. Our technology, not only does it help the pathologist to do their work faster, but it also is embedded within the lab workflow. You can think of the lab as the kind of a factory here, and we help all of that

Dr. Chris Heery is Chief Medical Officer at Arcellx, a company focusing on developing anito-cel, a significant advancement in CAR-T cell therapy, to treat relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma (rrMM). Multiple myeloma is a rare type of blood cancer that affects plasma cells in the bone marrow and has few treatment options. Arcellx is showing promising data from clinical trials with patients with rrMM who have failed prior therapies and have received Fast Track, Orphan Drug, and Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy Designations from the FDA for anito-cel. Chris explains, "The company was founded based on an idea that you could take a novel protein structure and modify it to be able to bind to targets on the surface of cancer cells. And over many years of work, the founders were able to demonstrate that that was possible. Over the last three or four years, Arcellx has focused more on taking what were some of those early ideas and turning them into a product that can help patients. For these last three or

Dr. Mohammed Elamir, lead physician at Aviv Clinics, offers diagnostics and treatments for brain injuries such as PTSD, stroke, and traumatic brain injury and to address cognitive decline. After comprehensive physical and mental assessment, including brain scans, patients receive hyperbaric oxygen therapy and other therapies like psychotherapy and neurocognitive training. Individualized plans are designed to get to the root causes of neurological and cognitive issues and stimulate the growth of new cells and blood flow, even for patients with long-standing conditions.   Dr. Mo explains, "Our pre-assessment testing is a lot more rigorous than your kind of annual physical. We do three to five days of testing that can involve medical evaluations with the medical doctors and advanced blood work for different biomarkers for injury or inflammation. Two very specific brain scans that I think separate our assessment from most, and one is an MRI with DTI analysis. That is a microstructure analysis of the brain. So we

Tomer Shussman, the Co-Founder and CEO of OneStep, is at the forefront of motion intelligence and gait analysis. OneStep provides a smartphone app that monitors movement and provides real-time data about gait patterns and changes over time. The system can predict and prevent conditions like falls, provide information about overall health, and reveal early warning signs for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and other aging-related diseases. Integrating OneStep's gait analysis data with Epic electronic health records allows healthcare providers to streamline documentation and leverage gait data to provide immediate actionable feedback to patients. Tomer explains, "When we started OneStep, we started with physical therapy and rehabilitation, particularly after knee replacements, hip replacements, and injuries of all kinds. But since then, we now have customers and partners who work with us on fall prevention, essentially identifying and quantifying the risk of falling through gait analysis. Our partners work with us on