Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Steven St. Peter, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Vie Ventures, discusses his firm's unique hybrid model that combines venture capital with disease philanthropy to accelerate the development of new therapies for autoimmune diseases.  While philanthropies have excelled at funding basic research, a gap exists in translating those findings into FDA-approved drugs. Steven points out that the autoimmune field is entering a golden age, driven by insights from immuno-oncology and by AI's potential to analyze data across autoimmune diseases. Steven explains, "I've been doing venture capital for the last 30 years. I'm also a physician, but I'm very interested in how venture capital is helping bring new therapies to patients, and that's really the core of what venture capital does. So I've been doing that and am comfortable with that for a long time, as well as my co-founders. About five years ago, I joined an effort working with the disease philanthropy to help create a hybrid model. And I thought that was ve

Ed Ahn, CEO of MEDIPOST, is developing next-generation stem cell therapies for inflammation-driven degenerative diseases with a primary focus on knee osteoarthritis. Using umbilical cord-derived stem cells, which have higher proliferation capacity than adult-derived stem cells, allows MEDIPOST to scale cell manufacturing and provide broader access to care. The company's lead program, Cartistem, has been approved in Korea for over 10 years, and new funding will accelerate US clinical trials. Ed explains, "We are focused on treating inflammation-driven degenerative diseases. So all these diseases that you commonly associate with the aging process. Those are some of the things that we're very interested in slowing the progression of." "We're actually going back to the source for neonatal stem cells from the cord blood. One of the primary advantages of going for a neonatal source of stem cells versus an adult source is that these are the most naive stem cells that one can obtain. And what I mean by naive is that

Yael Elish, Founder of StuffThatWorks, was part of the Waze founding team that brought crowdsourcing to maps and traffic. She is now bringing her insights into the power of the crowd to build a patient-generated real-world database to support patients and medical research, accelerating drug development, and improving the efficiency of clinical trials. Their OpenStuff platform is an AI-powered search tool that makes patient experience data accessible to patients, doctors, and researchers, and validates the patient experience. Yael explains, "As background, I was part of the Waze founding team, and this is where I got acquainted firsthand with the power of crowdsourcing. Waze does crowdsourcing of traffic and the building of maps. And this is where people are joining based on a common vision that if everyone shares information in an organized form. If there's a platform that can collect all the data in a structured format, it can deliver everything in a way that's much more useful and solves a very big problem

Jesse Lipson, Founder and CEO of Levitate, focuses on using AI to help providers enhance patient-provider communication and develop and maintain personal, authentic connections with patients. Patient expectations are changing due to AI, and patients now expect more responsive, personalized messaging from doctors. This service-as-software can support busy providers in developing and executing a communication strategy at scale to build their practices and strengthen relationships with patients. Jesse explains, "My vision was to help what I call relationship-based businesses. I would consider many types of healthcare practices to fall into that category, and to do a better job of keeping in touch with their patients in a more personal, authentic way at scale. And so I think the challenge is we all know the value of the simple things like remembering kids' names, pets' names, spouse names, hobbies, and reaching out and keeping in touch in a thoughtful way on a regular basis. But it's very hard to do that at scal

Dr. Justin Schrager, Founder and Chief Medical Officer at Vital, aims to address poor communication in acute care settings such as hospitals and urgent care centers. Vital's software platform provides patients with real-time, understandable information on their own devices via a secure website. This AI-powered system is designed to provide updates on lab results and educational content, and to augment clinical care without adding to the workload of doctors and nurses. Justin explains, "We make software for the hospital, urgent care, and inpatient settings. The problem is that communication suffers when you get busier. So the busier you are, the less communication happens. It's a bit of a catch-22. And it's sort of treated as an expendable action when things are really critical. I'm an ER doctor. I understand that. And so we're trying to solve that problem by essentially communicating to patients, keeping them up to date, and helping the clinical staff out when they frankly don't have a lot of time to share a

Dr. Charlotte McKee, Chief Medical Officer at Sionna, describes the nature of cystic fibrosis (CF, a genetic disease caused by a mutation in the single CFTR gene. While current CFTR modulator therapies do not address the most common mutation, Sionna's novel oral medicine is designed to target the previously undruggable NBDI domain of the CFTR protein. This new therapy aims to lead to better lung function and prevent the accumulation of permanent damage to other organs like the pancreas, gut, and liver.  Charlotte explains, "Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease. The gene was actually discovered in 1989 for cystic fibrosis. It's considered a rare disease, but it's a relatively large rare disease. And one of those rare diseases that is potentially fatal, as you mentioned, it's thought of as a lung disease. And most patients, if their life is shortened, it's typically because of lung disease, because the lungs can be very severely affected. But the protein is caused by a genetic mutation in a gene called CFTR, a

Mark Bertagnolli, Chief Operating Officer at ViroMissile, has developed a modified vaccinia virus that can be delivered intravenously to seek out and destroy solid tumors throughout the body and is not dependent on a specific genetic driver of a cancer. The virus has been engineered to be resistant to the body's complement system, allowing it to survive in the bloodstream longer to infect the tumor. This action also turns the tumor microenvironment from cold to hot, signaling the immune system to attack the tumor and potentially working in combination with other treatments like PD-1 inhibitors to make them more effective. Mark explains, "ViroMissile has a modified vaccinia virus, and viruses tend to like to infect tumor cells. So the trick has been how to harness this. And we're on our third generation of virus, and we have a virus that you can inject intravenously that searches for tumors throughout the body, infects them, the body clears the rest of the virus, and the virus embeds itself in the tumors, rep

Dr. Ronald Lane, Founder of HOPE-Neuron Therapeutx, is developing an approach to treating ALS by rebalancing the body's immune system, which becomes dysfunctional in neurodegenerative diseases. The mechanism involves treating a patient's blood outside the body to activate the immune system and then infusing it back into the patient. The theory is that traditional drugs often fail because they target static genetic mutations and symptoms, while the source of the disease lies in the ongoing immune imbalance.  Ronald explains, "Well, in a broad sense, the goal of HOPE Neuron is based on the fact that our challenge here is to bring hope. And we use a neuronal basis to do that. We're not about drugs. There are no chemicals involved. We don't go that direction. But basically, it cuts across. We deal with memory, we deal with dementia and Alzheimer's, but our target initially is ALS."   "As I mentioned a moment ago, we're not doing drugs, we're not using chemicals. So what are you doing? Well, we're using the cell'

Dr. Galia Schwarz, CEO and Co-Founder of C8 Health, has developed a platform that addresses the gap between hospital best practices and their implementation across all departments. This approach consolidates medical knowledge from numerous disconnected systems and uses AI to proactively deliver relevant information to a clinician. C8 Health does not create best practices; it ensures that a hospital's vetted standards are communicated consistently to provide optimal patient care. Galia explains, "Hospitals are struggling to implement their best practices effectively, or in other words, control the quality and cost of care delivery. And let me explain this. There is tons of medical knowledge out there, and now with AI coming into our lives, there is even more. And hospitals create this knowledge through clinical trials, or they license this knowledge through platforms like Open Evidence or UpToDate. And every hospital takes these global best practices and turns them into local best practices, things like proto

David Klein, a longtime healthcare innovator and Founder and CEO of Click Therapeutics, is a pioneer in the field of prescription digital therapeutics, PDT, which are defined as software as medicine. Click has received FDA authorization for an app to treat depression and migraine and had a successful pivotal trial for an app treating negative symptoms of schizophrenia. These digital therapeutics are designed to fill significant gaps in current care and there are opportunities to combine software with drugs and biometric data from wearables to determine personalized treatment plans. David explains, "Click's approach towards digital therapeutics is, I would say, probably the most rigorous from a clinical evidence perspective in the industry. So we really take a drug-like clinical approach to these programs where we discover and then validate these programs in multiple randomized control trials, all culminating usually in a pivotal trial. And on top of that, you'll often see in some other areas of the world or

Tony Baldassarre, President and CEO of UniDoc Health, has a mission to provide accessible healthcare through remote technology and a Health Cube that can be deployed in a wide range of settings. This approach integrates into existing EMR/EHR platforms and includes a healthcare professional who works with the patient in the Cube to interact with medical devices and consult remotely with a doctor. There have been successful deployments in Ukraine, Italy, and Alaska, showing a significant reduction in emergency room visits and demonstrating capabilities for specialized care and management of chronic conditions.  Tony explains, "With the UniDoc solution, what we do is not just enable a conversation between a doctor and patient - it is not just a phone or video call. We actually provide real diagnostic medical devices for doctors to conduct a comprehensive medical visit remotely, just as if the patient were in their office. The important thing is that number one, we only use real medical devices. These are medical

Dr. Jennifer Perusini, CEO and Founder of Neurovation Labs, is developing a precision medicine platform to create targeted therapeutics and diagnostic tools that treat specific brain regions to address central nervous system diseases. For the treatment of PTSD, the approach focuses on the overactive amygdala due to dysregulated glutamate signaling. This objective, brain-based approach of treating a discrete part of the brain rather than the whole brain moves mental health treatment beyond the current one-size-fits-all approach, reducing side effects and improving outcomes. Jennifer explains, "What we are doing is really taking an objective, precision approach to treating mental health disorders, something like an oncology model. So what we really care about is that mental health disorders and psychiatric disorders are rooted in brain dysfunction, yes, but critically that dysfunction occurs in very discreet brain regions and circuits, not necessarily uniformly across the entire brain. So we have really develop

Dr. Paul Testa, Chief Health Informatics Officer who helped create the About Me Initiative at NYU Langone Health, and Dr. Katherine Hochman, Director of Hospital Medicine at NYU Langone Health, who envisioned the initiative, discuss the benefits of encouraging patients to provide non-medical information. The goal is to help care teams see patients as whole people beyond their diagnoses and to give patients an opportunity to share interests, hobbies, and fun facts that can help build trust and meaningful human connections. This About Me Initiative is being expanded from inpatient care to outpatient settings, such as infusion centers. Paul explains, "The About Me section in our EHR Epic is something that NYU Langone developed with the inspiration of Dr. Hochman, and it's essentially a dedicated discreet space in the medical record to allow patients to declare themselves, allowing them to give them a space that is transparent to all the users of the electronic health record, which are many and vast in their rul

Dr. David Kirk, Chief Medical Officer at Regard, discusses the role and benefits of real-time clinical AI to help clinicians navigate patient charts and find critical information to prevent medication management errors and misdiagnoses. The Regard platform can also generate proactive documentation, allowing physicians to complete their documentation more accurately and efficiently, reducing note-bloat and the need for after-hours charting. One key goal of using AI is to free physicians to spend more time on the art of medicine, directly working with patients.   David explains, "So, Regard with real-time clinical artificial intelligence software, is helping clinicians propose the right diagnosis and information while they're working in the chart. Our mission is to make patient care as clear as possible. At the same time, we make sure that the doctors are getting the support they need so they can better support the patient. The charts of patients are getting bigger and bigger every year because more and more d

Daniel Hart, CEO of Sentact, describes the need to integrate technology, analytics, and services for hospitals and health systems to improve patient safety, patient outcomes, and regulatory readiness. One of Sentact's key goals is to help organizations gain insights from data to allow them to move from a reactive posture using lagging indicators to a proactive environment supported by AI and real-time data to generate early warning signals. Successful implementation of these insights also reduces operational costs and potentially eases clinician burnout. Daniel explains, "Sentact is a healthcare technology, services, and analytics company. Three core pillars of our business are across tech analytics and services. We serve the hospital and health system market primarily, although we do have all types of healthcare organizations in our customer base. But as an example, a representative example, we service 60% of the top 20 health systems in the market with our solutions. And we are focused on patient safety, q

Matt Holland is Chief Operating Officer at Healio, a company that has been producing high-quality, vetted information for healthcare professionals for over 100 years. The company has focused on personalization of data as it has evolved from print to digital to AI-driven access to on-demand information. Healio AI is also transforming continuing medical education from a static activity to a dynamic, personalized experience based on real-time information gaps. Matt explains, "We're a little bit unique in this space. We're family-owned and privately held, and have been for over a hundred years. So there are a lot of companies in this market right now that are not. So for decades, the focus has really been on developing and delivering quality information to healthcare professionals through all sorts of different channels. Obviously, prior to the internet, it started with good publications and journals. We also have a series of live meetings and conferences, but the primary focus really is the Healio AI, which we

 Ryan Clarke, Co-Founder and CTO of Syntax Bio, is focused on solving manufacturing challenges in producing stem cell-derived therapies, specifically the process of stem cell differentiation. The Cellgorithm platform was designed to make differentiation an engineering problem by using a modified form of CRISPR to turn genes on and off in a specific, controlled sequence, reducing processing time from months to days and resulting in cost savings. One goal is to use AI and machine learning to build models capable of predicting optimal gene regulation sequences accelerating the discovery of new differentiation protocols and treatments for degenerative diseases. Ryan explains, "The key problem that we are focused on applies to stem cell-derived cell therapies. And so, just for a little bit of context setting, we use induced pluripotent stem cells or IPS cells. And about 20 years ago, when these were first derived, everybody was very excited because this is the platform where you could then have an infinite supply

Dr. Daniel Sodickson is Chief Medical Scientist at Function Health and author of the new book, The Future of Seeing: How Imaging Is Changing Our World. Building on the drive to improve medical imaging, AI and neural networks are now reshaping image interpretation and how and what data are collected. This approach produces high-quality results with minimal additional data and is inspiring innovative scanning techniques and equipment design. The future of medical imaging is the everywhere scanner, enhancing a single-shot session with a large hospital machine with continuous health monitoring through wearables and devices integrated into everyday life.  Daniel explains, "One of the things that imaging can do is peel away all of the obscuring layers of skin or skull or whatever else there is, without having to make a single cut, and show us the inner workings, show us inner space, what's inside. I think that means being able to detect tumors early enough that they can be cured, to guide surgeries, to try to unde

Dr. Howard Federoff, Scientific Co-Founder, Chief Medical Officer, and Executive Vice President of Corporate Medicine and Science at Kenai Therapeutics, is developing a cell therapy for Parkinson's disease that involves transplanting IPSCs into the brain to replace lost dopamine neurons.  The goal is not to cure the underlying cause of the disease, but to restore motor function and reverse the disease's progression. Initial clinical focus was on patients with moderate to moderate-severe idiopathic Parkinson's, showing efficacy and safety, leading to expanding the study to include earlier-stage and familial forms of the disease. Howard explains, "Kenai was formed about three and a half years ago, and the intention is to develop a cellular product, which means that what is manufactured will be eligible in the right patient groups who have a diagnosis of Parkinson's to be placed into the brain. And consequent to its placement, the cells will then form new circuits, dopamine circuits that are lost owing to the d

Brent Ness, CEO and President of Aclarion,  highlights the challenges of diagnosing and treating chronic lower back pain, a leading driver of healthcare costs and opioid addiction. Traditional MRI and CT imaging do not reveal the biochemical source of pain within spinal discs, leading to misdiagnosis and unsuccessful treatment. The Aclarion technology uses MR spectroscopy to measure pain-causing biomarkers and, through a cloud-based, AI-powered SaaS model, analyzes the raw data and sends the physician a report within minutes. Brent explains, "The diagnosis and accurate treatment planning of back pain are incredibly complex. And when you think about pain management physicians, rehab, all the way up to spine surgery identifying the source of pain accurately leads to better treatment and then obviously better outcomes.There are 266 million people around the world who suffer from chronic low back pain. So I'm not talking about the kind that you had a rough weekend skiing, golfing, or hiking, and you're a little