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.
Apr 22, 2024
Greg Sturmer, CEO and Co-Founder, and Tom Jenkins, Chief Science Officer and Co-Founder of Elysium Therapeutics, talk about their SMART Opioid O2P, which aims to address the risks of taking opioids while still delivering the analgesic efficacy of opioids. The compound is designed to be resistant to abuse through snorting or injections and includes a trypsin inhibitor that prevents the release of the opioid when multiple pills are ingested. Elysium is also developing SOOPR, an opioid overdose rescue medication that has a longer duration of action to counteract the longer-lasting effects of synthetic opioids such as Fentanyl.
Greg explains, "When we talk about our SMART opioids for pain, SMART stands for Safer Medicines that Alleviate Risks and Trauma. Our space is led by our O2P hydrocodone product candidate, and O2P stands for oral overdose protection."
"So what O2P hydrocodone is designed to do is mitigate those major risks associated with existing prescription opioids, but doing so without sacrificing their superior analgesic efficacy, especially when compared to currently marketed non-opioid alternatives and those in development. We're excited to say that we've demonstrated human proof of concept in a recent study that we announced. But what I'd like to do is have Tom step in. Again, he is the inventor of our technology. He's a PhD synthetic organic chemist out of Stanford. Tom, do you want to talk about the technology and maybe compare it to past attempts at abuse-deterrent formulation?"
Tom elaborates, "How we answer the question and how our technology works is fairly straightforward. What we've done is we've taken the opioid molecule with hydrocodone, and we can use any opioid molecule, morphine, oxycodone, or any of the prescription opioids. What we do is make a molecular modification to the drug. The key part of that is the conditional bioavailability of the drug is the fact that the drug has to see digestive enzyme, specifically trypsin, in the small intestine before it can be converted to an active drug."
#ElysiumTherapeutics #Opioids #OpioidAbuse #SyntheticOpioids #OpioidUseDisorder #PainManagement #SaferMedicines
