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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Sep 12, 2025
Elizabeth Jeffords, CEO and President of Iolyx Therapeutics, discusses dry eye disease and its connection to autoimmune conditions. The company's novel therapeutic topical immune modulator is designed to treat the root inflammation in the eye, which systemic drugs often fail to reach due to the blood-retina barrier. Patients with dry eye disease often have multiple comorbidities and are excluded from clinical trials, making this research even more significant in finding treatments for a growing population.
Elizabeth explains, "Some people have physical dry eye, i.e., they have a dysfunction in their meibomian glands, and they can't make enough tears or those tears aren't the right composition. But more than half of the patients with dry eye have an underlying autoimmune disease. And they might know that, and they might not. So, patients with either Sjogren's disease or any of the thyroid conditions, patients with rheumatoid arthritis, MS, connective tissue dysfunction, most of those patients have some ocular comorbidities, and specifically, dry eye is probably one of the biggest ones."
"Sometimes we treat the body, and we can treat autoimmune diseases successfully, but you don't really get most drugs into the eye. And so those alarm bells are still going off in the eye. And unfortunately, these patients with autoimmune disease tend to have more severe disease. They respond differently to the drugs that are out there today and probably most troublesome to us, and why Iolyx is really targeted these patients is that they get excluded from most of trials because they're just more difficult to treat, but they're also more difficult to treat because they have systemic medications that they're on, and most of those drugs get excluded."
#IolyxTherapeutics #DryEyeDisease #Ophthalmology #AutoimmuneDisease #EyeCare #ImmunoOphthalmology #ClinicalTrials
