Empowered Patient Podcast Karen Jagoda

Robert Towarnicki, CEO and Co-founder of SIRPant Immunotherapeutics, discusses cancer-specific immunotherapy for aggressive tumors, the role macrophages play in the immune response to cancer, and how cancer cells can shut down this response. SIRPant Immunotherapeutics aims to modify macrophages by reducing SIRPα expression, triggering them to eat cancer cells and educate other immune cells. Early evidence demonstrates potential effectiveness for various cancers, including non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and solid tumors. Robert emphasizes this therapy's scalability and cost advantages compared to other cell therapies like CAR-T. He also highlights the potential for treating rare diseases and the ability of SIRPant-M to target a wide range of cancers without the need for pre-identified targets.
Robert explains, "Macrophages are a normal immune cell type in your body. They normally function to recognize foreign invaders and process them in the sense of phagocytizing or eating the foreign protein and invader, if it's a virus, a bacteria, or a cancer. Unfortunately, cancers are very good at shutting down this immune response. So, we need to modify the macrophage and re-empower it to elicit the other immune cells in the body to do their job and eliminate cancer."
"I think one of the mistakes we've seen with others working with the macrophage in this situation was the lack of appreciation for the role of SIRPα. Our inventor, Dr. Yuan Liu at Georgia State University, identified this early on through a knockout mouse, a mouse where SIRPα was genetically removed from it. With that mouse, she could discover and learn how macrophages function and react. It directed us to the whole concept of removing SIRPα from the macrophage. Now, removal alone is not enough. You also have to activate a macrophage. So, a macrophage exists in multiple states. There's an active state, and then there's an inactive state."
#SIRPant #Immunotherapy #Macrophages #Oncology #Cancer
sirpantimmunotx.com
 Listen to the podcast here

Robert Towarnicki, CEO and Co-founder of SIRPant Immunotherapeutics, discusses cancer-specific immunotherapy for aggressive tumors, the role macrophages play in the immune response to cancer, and how cancer cells can shut down this response. SIRPant Immunotherapeutics aims to modify macrophages by reducing SIRPα expression, triggering them to eat cancer cells and educate other immune cells. Early evidence demonstrates potential effectiveness for various cancers, including non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and solid tumors. Robert emphasizes this therapy's scalability and cost advantages compared to other cell therapies like CAR-T. He also highlights the potential for treating rare diseases and the ability of SIRPant-M to target a wide range of cancers without the need for pre-identified targets.
Robert explains, "Macrophages are a normal immune cell type in your body. They normally function to recognize foreign invaders and process them in the sense of phagocytizing or eating the foreign protein and invader, if it's a virus, a bacteria, or a cancer. Unfortunately, cancers are very good at shutting down this immune response. So, we need to modify the macrophage and re-empower it to elicit the other immune cells in the body to do their job and eliminate cancer."
"I think one of the mistakes we've seen with others working with the macrophage in this situation was the lack of appreciation for the role of SIRPα. Our inventor, Dr. Yuan Liu at Georgia State University, identified this early on through a knockout mouse, a mouse where SIRPα was genetically removed from it. With that mouse, she could discover and learn how macrophages function and react. It directed us to the whole concept of removing SIRPα from the macrophage. Now, removal alone is not enough. You also have to activate a macrophage. So, a macrophage exists in multiple states. There's an active state, and then there's an inactive state."
#SIRPant #Immunotherapy #Macrophages #Oncology #Cancer
sirpantimmunotx.com
Download the transcript here

Jeff Surges, CEO of RLDatix, offers global cloud-based solutions for risk management, compliance management, and regulatory management in healthcare. To address patient safety, Jeff emphasizes the need for a collaborative workforce, data analytics, and AI. RLDatix uses technology to automate information gathering, facilitate incident reporting, and analyze data to determine proactive actions to prevent incidents and improve safety.
 Jeff explains, "The simplest analogy when I get asked this is: how does this relate to other industries? We all fly in airplanes, and we've seen in the airline industry most recently with doors coming off, the emergency exit doors, close calls, or what we'll call incidents where you need to look at the root cause. The key difference is if a plane goes down, as tragic as that is, the pilots and the crew go down. But in healthcare, if there's an incident or a procedure or an event that has occurred, it's likely only affecting the patient and the patient's family. That's not meant to say that people don't care, everybody cares, but it doesn't affect the entire circumference. What we try to do is make it automated, make it easy to use, engage with what we call a culture of safety, which starts at the very highest level, and then using data analytics, now, generative AI."
"For 20 years, an article written in our industry called To Err Is Human kicked off the energy around improving patient safety. I think the first phase of that for over ten years, 15 years, was just documenting the event after it happened. Let's document. Let's run around and automate, document, and report on it."
"Today, that's no longer the case. All of our customers and our industry want to prevent this. We use terms like highly reliable- I want to be an HRO, a highly reliable organization. We're competing on safety. Everybody wants to go to the safest place for care. We're trying to use data and analytics to both prevent and gain the insights to make sure that we can continue that not just one time. The data is telling us there are some decisions we can make in our policies and our procedures, in our staffing levels, and in our credentialing of staff to make sure that we can continue. So, going from reactive to proactive risk mitigation." 
#RLDatix #ConnectedHealthcareOperations #PatientSafety #HealthTech #AI
rldatix.com
Listen to the podcast here

Jeff Surges, CEO of RLDatix, offers global cloud-based solutions for risk management, compliance management, and regulatory management in healthcare. To address patient safety, Jeff emphasizes the need for a collaborative workforce, data analytics, and AI. RLDatix uses technology to automate information gathering, facilitate incident reporting, and analyze data to determine proactive actions to prevent incidents and improve safety.
 Jeff explains, "The simplest analogy when I get asked this is: how does this relate to other industries? We all fly in airplanes, and we've seen in the airline industry most recently with doors coming off, the emergency exit doors, close calls, or what we'll call incidents where you need to look at the root cause. The key difference is if a plane goes down, as tragic as that is, the pilots and the crew go down. But in healthcare, if there's an incident or a procedure or an event that has occurred, it's likely only affecting the patient and the patient's family. That's not meant to say that people don't care, everybody cares, but it doesn't affect the entire circumference. What we try to do is make it automated, make it easy to use, engage with what we call a culture of safety, which starts at the very highest level, and then using data analytics, now, generative AI."
"For 20 years, an article written in our industry called To Err Is Human kicked off the energy around improving patient safety. I think the first phase of that for over ten years, 15 years, was just documenting the event after it happened. Let's document. Let's run around and automate, document, and report on it."
"Today, that's no longer the case. All of our customers and our industry want to prevent this. We use terms like highly reliable- I want to be an HRO, a highly reliable organization. We're competing on safety. Everybody wants to go to the safest place for care. We're trying to use data and analytics to both prevent and gain the insights to make sure that we can continue that not just one time. The data is telling us there are some decisions we can make in our policies and our procedures, in our staffing levels, and in our credentialing of staff to make sure that we can continue. So, going from reactive to proactive risk mitigation." 
#RLDatix #ConnectedHealthcareOperations #PatientSafety #HealthTech #AI
rldatix.com
Download the transcript here

Lou Lintereur, Chief Engineer for automated delivery systems at Medtronic Diabetes, brought his knowledge from working as an aerospace engineer at NASA  to developing technology for those living with diabetes.  He introduces the MiniMed 780G, a closed-loop system that combines an insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor (CGM) with a control algorithm that tailors itself to each patient's unique physiology and Meal Detection technology, which helps manage their blood sugar levels. Patient feedback is essential to the continuing innovation of these hybrid closed-loop tools to manage diabetes.
Lou explains, "There are two main challenges we're always trying to deal with, and they kind of compete with each other. One is just the fundamental technology, trying to get the best therapy for the patients and the best outcomes for a long, healthy life where they're feeling good. With respect to diabetes, it's about keeping your blood sugar under as tight a control as possible within a normal glucose range. So that poses the technical challenges of how to design a control system to do that with all the uncertainties of human physiology and so forth."
"But on the other side, the systems we make at Medtronic Diabetes are almost consumer products. In order to get the therapy that they need, the patient often has to contribute to the therapy. They need to indicate when they're eating, for example, and then help the system calculate how much they're eating so that they can dose the insulin properly to manage their meals better. It requires some cooperation with the patients. So, on that side of the challenge is, how do you make the system easy enough to use so that the patient can get the best outcomes possible and do as little work as possible? Because the last thing the patient wants to do is be bothered all the time having to manage their therapy."
#MedtronicDiabetes #Diabetes #ContinuousGlucoseMonitor #CGM #InsulinPump 
medtronicdiabetes.com
Listen to the podcast here

Lou Lintereur, Chief Engineer for automated delivery systems at Medtronic Diabetes, brought his knowledge from working as an aerospace engineer at NASA  to developing technology for those living with diabetes.  He introduces the MiniMed 780G, a closed-loop system that combines an insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor (CGM) with a control algorithm that tailors itself to each patient's unique physiology and Meal Detection technology, which helps manage their blood sugar levels. Patient feedback is essential to the continuing innovation of these hybrid closed-loop tools to manage diabetes.
Lou explains, "There are two main challenges we're always trying to deal with, and they kind of compete with each other. One is just the fundamental technology, trying to get the best therapy for the patients and the best outcomes for a long, healthy life where they're feeling good. With respect to diabetes, it's about keeping your blood sugar under as tight a control as possible within a normal glucose range. So that poses the technical challenges of how to design a control system to do that with all the uncertainties of human physiology and so forth."
"But on the other side, the systems we make at Medtronic Diabetes are almost consumer products. In order to get the therapy that they need, the patient often has to contribute to the therapy. They need to indicate when they're eating, for example, and then help the system calculate how much they're eating so that they can dose the insulin properly to manage their meals better. It requires some cooperation with the patients. So, on that side of the challenge is, how do you make the system easy enough to use so that the patient can get the best outcomes possible and do as little work as possible? Because the last thing the patient wants to do is be bothered all the time having to manage their therapy."
#MedtronicDiabetes #Diabetes #ContinuousGlucoseMonitor #CGM #InsulinPump 
medtronicdiabetes.com
Download the transcript here