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How is the 3D Printing Community Responding to COVID-19?

Posted in 3D Printing for Medical Application, COVID-19, Economic Impact of Coronavirus Pandemic, tagged 3D printing, COVID-19, healthcare, medical devices, Respiratory illness on March 23, 2020| Leave a Comment »

How is the 3D Printing Community Responding to COVID-19?

Reporter: Irina Robu, PhD

As the new pandemic COVID-19 takes over the globe, several countries are implementing travel restrictions, social distancing and work from home policies. Healthcare systems are overloaded and fatigued by this new coronavirus (COVID-19). Since COVID-19 is a respiratory illness, patients require specialist respirators to take over the role of the lungs. These respirators are in short supply, however, along with medical personnel, hospital space and other personal safety equipment required to treat patients.

Professional AM providers, makers and designers in the 3D printing community have started to answer to the global crisis by volunteering their respective skills to ease the pressure on supply chains and governments. The additive manufacturing and 3D printing community has numerous members keen to support during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A hospital in Brescia, Italy with 250 Coronavirus patients lacking breathing machines has recently run out of the respiratory valves needed to connect the patients to the machines. In response to the situation, the CEO of Isinnova, Cristian Fracassi used 3D bioprinting to produce 100 respirator valves in 24 hours, which are currently being put to use in the Brescian hospital.

At the same time, Materialise, has released files for a 3D printed hands-free door handle attachment to lessen Coronavirus transmission via one of the most common mediums. Door handles are exposed to a lot of physical contact over the course of a day, especially in public spaces such as offices and hospitals. The 3D printable add-on allows users to carry out the lever action required to pop open most modern doors using their elbows.

Protolabs, a leading on-demand manufacturer with 3D Printing is using rapid production methods to good use during the current Coronavirus outbreak by producing components for #COVID19 test kits and ventilators. California-based Airwolf3D volunteered their own fleet of 3D printers for the manufacturing of respirator valves and custom medical components. The company is also offering remote technical support for medical staff that would like to know more about 3D printing.

Volkswagen has started a task force that will adapt its car-making capacity and manufacturing facilities to the production of hospital ventilators and medical devices. Using their own 125 industrial 3D printers to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, Volkswagen is donating face masks to healthcare providers and local authorities as part of an agreement made with German Health Minister.

Stratasys has organized its global 3D printing resources to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic by printing full-face shields to provide protection to healthcare workers. The company showed that the strength of 3D bioprinting can be adapted on the fly to address shortages of parts related to shields, masks, and ventilators, among other things.
Doctors, hospital technicians and 3D-printing specialists are also using Google Docs, WhatsApp groups and online databases to trade tips for building, fixing and modifying machines like ventilators to help treat the rising number of patients with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

The efforts come as supply shortages loom in one of the biggest challenges for health care systems around the world.

SOURCE

3D Printing Community responds to COVID-19 and Coronavirus resources

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Live Coverage MedCity Converge 2018 Philadelphia: The David vs Goliaths, PrecisionMed Networks and Fireside Chat with Michael Pellini

Posted in Cancer Informatics, Conference Coverage with Social Media, Evidence-based decision-making, Health Economics and Outcomes Research, Health Law & Patient Safety, HealthCare IT, Uncategorized, tagged #mobilehealth, Big data, Foundation Medicine, healthcare, Innovation, medical devices, medical devices and digital health, Medical technology, Mobile Healthcare, precision medicine on July 11, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Reporter: Stephen J. Williams, PhD

10:00-10:45 AM The Davids vs. the Cancer Goliath Part 1

Startups from diagnostics, biopharma, medtech, digital health and emerging tech will have 8 minutes to articulate their visions on how they aim to tame the beast.

Start Time	End Time	Company
10:00	10:08	Belong.Life
10:09	10:17	Care+Wear
10:18	10:26	OncoPower
10:27	10:35	PolyAurum LLC
10:36	10:44	Seeker Health

Speakers:
Karthik Koduru, MD, Co-Founder and Chief Oncologist, OncoPower
Eliran Malki, Co-Founder and CEO, Belong.Life
Chaitenya Razdan, Co-founder and CEO, Care+Wear @_crazdan
Debra Shipley Travers, President & CEO, PolyAurum LLC @polyaurum
Sandra Shpilberg, Founder and CEO, Seeker Health @sandrashpilberg

Belong Life

10,000 cancer patients a month helping patients navigate cancer care with Belong App
Belong Eco system includes all their practitioners and using a trigger based content delivery (posts, articles etc)
most important taking unstructured health data (images, social activity, patient compilance) and converting to structured data

Care+Wear

personally design picc line cover for oncology patients

partners include NBA Major league baseball, Oscar de la Renta,

designs easy access pic line gowns and shirts

OncoPower :Digital Health in a Blockchain Ecosystem

problems associated with patient adherence and developed a product to address this

OncoPower Blockchain: HIPAA compliant using the coin Oncopower security token to incentiavize patients and oncologists to consult with each other or oncologists with tumor boards; this is not an initial coin offering

PolyArum

spinout from UPENN; developing a nanoparticle based radiation therapy; glioblastoma muse model showed great response with gold based nanoparticle and radiation
they see enhanced tumor penetration, and retention of the gold nanoparticles
however most nanoparticles need to be a large size greater than 5 nm to see effect so they used a polymer based particle; see good uptake but excretion past a week so need to re-dose with Au nanoparticles
they are looking for capital and expect to start trials in 2020

Seeker Health

tying to improve the efficiency of clinical trial enrollment
using social networks to find the patients to enroll in clinical trials
steps they use 1) find patients on Facebook, Google, Twitter 2) engage patient screen 3) screening at clinical sites
Seeker Portal is a patient management system: patients referred to a clinical site now can be tracked

11:00- 11:45 AM Breakout: How to Scale Precision Medicine

The potential for precision medicine is real, but is limited by access to patient datasets. How are government entities, hospitals and startups bringing the promise of precision medicine to the masses of oncology patients

Moderator: Sandeep Burugupalli, Senior Manager, Real World Data Innovation, Pfizer @sandeepburug
Speakers:
Ingo Chakravarty, President and CEO, Navican @IngoChakravarty
Eugean Jiwanmall, Senior Research Analyst for Medical Policy & Technology Evaluation , Independence Blue Cross @IBX
Andrew Norden, M.D., Chief Medical Officer, Cota @ANordenMD
Ankur Parikh M.D, Medical Director of Precision Medicine, Cancer Treatment Centers of America @CancerCenter

Ingo: data is not ordered, only half of patients are tracked in some database, reimbursement a challenge

Eugean: identifying mutations as patients getting more comprehensive genomic coverage, clinical trials are expanding more rapidly as seen in 2018 ASCO

Ingo: general principals related to health outcomes or policy or reimbursement.. human studies are paramount but payers may not allowing for general principals (i.e. an Alk mutation in lung cancer and crizotanib treatment may be covered but maybe not for glioblastoma or another cancer containing similar ALK mutation; payers still depend on clinical trial results)

Andrew: using gene panels and NGS but only want to look for actionable targets; they establish an expert panel which reviews these NGS sequence results to determine actionable mutations

Ankur: they have molecular tumor boards but still if want to prescribe off label and can’t find a clinical trial there is no reimbursement

Andrew: going beyond actionable mutations, although many are doing WES (whole exome sequencing) can we use machine learning to see if there are actionable data from a WES

Ingo: we forget in datasets is that patients have needs today and we need those payment systems and structures today

Eugean: problem is the start from cost (where the cost starts at and was it truly medically necessary)

Norden: there are not enough data sharing to make a decision; an enormous amount of effort to get businesses and technical limitations in data sharing; possibly there are policies needed to be put in place to assimilate datasets and promote collaborations

Ingo: need to take out the middle men between sequencing of patient tumor and treatment decision; middle men are taking out value out of the ‘supply chain’;

Andrew: PATIENTS DON’T OWN their DATA but MOST clinicians agree THEY SHOULD

Ankur: patients are willing to share data but the HIPAA compliance is a barrier

11:50- 12:30 AM Fireside Chat with Michael Pellini, M.D.

Building a Precision Medicine Business from the Ground Up: An Operating and Venture Perspective

Dr. Pellini has spent more than 20 years working on the operating side of four companies, each of which has pushed the boundaries of the standard of care. He will describe his most recent experience at Foundation Medicine, at the forefront of precision medicine, and how that experience can be leveraged on the venture side, where he now evaluates new healthcare technologies.

Speaker:
Michael Pellini, M.D., Managing Partner, Section 32 and Chairman, Foundation Medicine @MichaelPellini

Roche just bought Foundation Medicine for $2.5 billion. They negotiated over 7 months but aside from critics they felt it was a great deal because it gives them, as a diagnostic venture, the international reach and biotech expertise. Foundation Medicine offered Roche expertise on the diagnostic space including ability to navigate payers and regulatory aspects of the diagnostic business. He feels it benefits all aspects of patient care and the work they do with other companies.

Moderatore: Roche is doing multiple deals to ‘own’ a disease state.

Dr. Pellini: Roche is closing a deal with Flatiron just like how Merck closed deals with genomics companies. He feels best to build the best company on a stand alone basis and provide for patients, then good things will happen. However the problem of achieving scale for Precision Medicine is reimbursement by payers. They still have to keep collecting data and evolving services to suit pharma. They didn’t know if there model would work but when he met with FDA in 2011 they worked with Precision Medicine, said collect the data and we will keep working with you,

However the payers aren’t contributing to the effort. They need to assist some of the young companies that can’t raise the billion dollars needed for all the evidence that payers require. Precision Medicine still have problems, even though they have collected tremendous amounts of data and raised significant money. From the private payer perspective there is no clear roadmap for success.

They recognized that the payers would be difficult but they had a plan but won’t invest in companies that don’t have a plan for getting reimbursement from payers.

Moderator: What is section 32?

Pellini: Their investment arm invests in the spectrum of precision healtcare companies including tech companies. They started with a digital path imaging system that went from looking through a scope and now looking at a monitor with software integrated with medical records. Section 32 has $130 million under management and may go to $400 Million but they want to stay small.

Pellini: we get 4-5 AI pitches a week.

Moderator: Are you interested in companion diagnostics?

Pellini: There may be 24 expected 2018 drug approvals and 35% of them have a companion diagnostic (CDX) with them. however going out ten years 70% may have a CDX associated with them. Payers need to work with companies to figure out how to pay with these CDXs.