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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. 

 

Check out our new EmpoweredPatient.Solutions site where you can quickly search all of the Empowered Patient Podcast interviews by any word or phrase to identify useful resources, potential partners, and insights about the life sciences landscape.

Empowered Patient Solutions

Jul 25, 2024

Sofia Elizondo, COO and Co-Founder of Brightseed, discusses the company's focus on bioactives and their potential to improve health outcomes. Bioactives are small molecules found in nature, such as plants, fungi, or bacteria, that activate human biological receptors and positively affect the body. Brightseed uses its AI platform, Forager, to identify and commercialize these bioactive compounds in foods, supplements, and over-the-counter medicine. As part of the food is medicine movement, Brightseed's goal is to make these superfoods more accessible to a broader population.  

Sofia explains, "To bring us back to the source, caffeine is a small molecule. It’s a natural chemical that a seed produces. And so we take these coffee seeds, grind them up, and then extract the caffeine and other tasty flavors with water every morning."

"When we take a sip of our coffee, it’s actually very well understood what happens with caffeine. We absorb it in our stomach lining. The caffeine molecule goes into our bloodstream, goes into our brain while our blood is circulating around our body, and docks with a biological receptor called the adenosine receptor in our brain. What happens is it interacts with this receptor, and then we feel a bunch of downstream effects. We feel focus and energy, and maybe too much of an adrenaline rush sometimes."

"But this is a great example that many of us can be familiar with of the power of such a small molecule. It’s just one bioactive in one bean of one plant that can have this very precise and recognizable effect. In this case, science knows very well exactly what it does."

"In the big picture of bioactives, there are hundreds of thousands of them in plants and foods that we eat every day that we may not know or may not have cataloged. Science, in most cases, doesn’t exactly know what it does when we ingest these bioactives, at least not yet."

#Brightseed #AppliedAI #Bioactive #Nutrition #FoodisMedicine

brightseedbio.com

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Brightseed