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Welcome to the Empowered Patient Podcast with Karen Jagoda.  This show is a window into the latest innovations in applying generative AI, novel therapeutics and vaccines, and the changing dynamics in the medical and healthcare environment. One focus is on how providers, pharmaceutical companies, and payers are empowering patients.  In addition, conversations are often about how providers, care facilities, pharmaceutical companies, and payers are being empowered by technology to improve patient outcomes and reduce friction across the healthcare landscape.

Popular Topics

  • Virtual and digital health
  • Use of AI, ML, and LLM in healthcare and drug discovery, development, trials
  • Value-based healthcare 
  • Precision and stratified medicine
  • Integration of digital technology into existing workflow and procedures 
  • Next-generation immuno, cell, and gene therapies
  • Vaccines
  • Biomarkers, sequencing, and imaging
  • Rare diseases
  • MedTech and medical devices
  • Clinical trials
  • Addressing Social Determinants of Health
  • Treating chronic conditions like obesity and pain
  • Clinician and staff burnout

The audience includes life science leaders, researchers, medical professionals, patient advocates, digital health entrepreneurs, patients, caregivers, healthcare solution providers, students, journalists, and investors. 

 

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Empowered Patient Solutions

Jan 29, 2024

Dr. Fiona Elwood, VP and Neurodegeneration Disease Area Stronghold leader at J&J Innovative Medicine discusses the challenges in developing new therapies for neurodegenerative diseases in part because of the heterogeneity of the patient population.  She highlights the difficulty in defining the subsets of these diseases and identifying the right patients for clinical trials. Emphasizing the importance of early detection, J&J Innovative Medicine is developing strategies to support the move to precision medicine in treating diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to prevent patients from moving to a symptomatic stage of disease.  

Fiona explains, "For example, in Alzheimer's disease, as many people know, one of the primary symptoms is dementia, but dementia is a symptom. There can be other reasons why people develop forms of dementia. Alzheimer's disease is a specific disease where now we know patients can be defined by the pathology in the patient's brain. So specifically, the patients develop amyloid plaques, extracellular clumps or plaques of the amyloid beta peptide, and intracellular, inside neurons, tangles of a protein called tau. So, it's these pathological hallmarks that characterize or define Alzheimer's disease and lead to symptoms such as dementia."

"We know that Alzheimer's, for example, starts about ten years before patients display symptoms. But we don't know exactly how quickly each person might progress or the specific subset of symptoms that each patient may be particularly susceptible to."

"Then maybe the third thing I'll call out that's been a real challenge to us has been the time course of disease and the fact that the Alzheimer's pathology can start 10, 20 years before patients show up at their doctor's office. Historically, we weren't able to detect those very earliest stages of disease. Now, because of the field's investment in different biomarker technologies, imaging technologies, digital technologies, and even highly sensitive blood-based screening technologies, we can identify patients right at the beginning of that pathological cascade."

#JNJInnovativeMedicine #Neuroscience #Neurodegeneration #AlzheimersDisease 

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