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.
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Mar 27, 2025
Dr. Neal Kassell, Founder and Chairman of the Focused Ultrasound Foundation, is working to raise awareness and drive the utilization of focused ultrasound to treat a wide range of medical conditions. This non-invasive technology uses medical imaging to precisely target and treat tissue deep in the body. Focused ultrasound has multiple mechanisms of action and can be used for destroying tumors, modulating neural activity, delivering drugs, and stimulating the immune system.
Neal explains, "So focused ultrasound is a new, totally non-invasive therapeutic technology, and it's the intersection of medical imaging, which is either ultrasound or MR imaging, which is used to identify the portion of the body that we want to treat to plan the treatment, and then to guide the treatment. Then, the focused ultrasound technology delivers the energy that treats the tissue. The way it works is analogous to using a magnifying glass to focus beams of light and burn a hole in a leaf."
"But at that focal point where all the beams converge, we now understand 30 ways ultrasound can affect tissue. That's in contrast to, for instance, radiation therapy, which is only one mechanism of action. Or a surgical robot, which is one mechanism of action. Focused Ultrasound has at least 30 mechanisms of action, including destroying tissue at that focal point by a variety of mechanisms, stimulating or blocking neural activity in the brain called neuromodulation, and delivering drugs or other therapeutic agents precisely to a point in the body where they are needed. This increases both the effectiveness and decreases the systemic side effects, stimulates the body's immune response to tumor, and to the effectiveness of cancer immunotherapy agents."
"The point in the body where the ultrasound is targeted is, as I said, previously guided and controlled by medical imaging, either ultrasound or MR imaging. Now, the fact that there are so many different mechanisms of action creates the opportunity to treat a wide variety of medical disorders. Today, around the world, there are more than 180 clinical indications or diseases in various stages of research and development in commercialization. Ten years ago or so, there were only three. That's how rapidly the field is growing."
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