Andria Parks, Head of Commercial Operations at First Ascent Biomedical, highlights the value of using a biopsy to grow cancer cells in a lab to determine which drugs are most likely to be effective against a specific cancer. This functional medicine approach combines lab data, genomic data, and AI to produce a report that identifies which drugs might work and which are unlikely to be effective for that individual patient. This perspective is particularly effective for rare cancers, which often lack established treatment guidelines.

Andria explains, "First Ascent Biomedical is a functional precision medicine company. And what that means is we've put together three very unique and advanced technologies to produce something very specific, and I'll explain what that means. What we do is we take a fresh biopsy from a patient, and we will grow those cells in our lab in a medium very similar to the human body. We will test or validate more than 150 drugs and drug combinations on those cells to see what works on those cells and what kills them. We will combine that with a patient's genomic information using our advanced AI. And then a report is produced that stack ranks the drugs that work, but most importantly, the drugs that don't work for that patient's cancer. And when a physician sees that report, they know exactly what to start with before initiating treatment. So everything we do is outside the body."

"If you are testing 150 drugs and combinations on your unique cancer cells, you will be able to know what works and doesn't ahead of time. Usually, most patients who don't follow this approach go through a standard-of-care protocol. And what that means is these protocols or ways of treating patients are based on hundreds of thousands of patients that may look like you and me, but are not you and me. So it's based on evidence of many, many, many patients with a similar type of profile. But the uniqueness of getting a drug to work for your specific cancers is based on your unique cells. So that's what makes a big difference. You may see 20% - 40% that works, but without knowing if they were tested on your cancer cells, and that's what makes a big difference with what functional precision medicine in oncology delivers."

#FirstAscentBiomedical #PrecisionMedicine #CancerResearch #Oncology #PersonalizedMedicine #HealthTech #RareCancer #Innovation #FunctionalMedicine #AI #Biotech #PatientCare

firstascentbiomedical.com

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Dr. Steven St. Peter, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Vie Ventures, discusses his firm's unique hybrid model that combines venture capital with disease philanthropy to accelerate the development of new therapies for autoimmune diseases. While philanthropies have excelled at funding basic research, a gap exists in translating those findings into FDA-approved drugs. Steven points out that the autoimmune field is entering a golden age, driven by insights from immuno-oncology and by AI's potential to analyze data across autoimmune diseases.

Steven explains, "I've been doing venture capital for the last 30 years. I'm also a physician, but I'm very interested in how venture capital is helping bring new therapies to patients, and that's really the core of what venture capital does. So I've been doing that and am comfortable with that for a long time, as well as my co-founders. About five years ago, I joined an effort working with the disease philanthropy to help create a hybrid model. And I thought that was very interesting because these disease philanthropies are really the voice of the patient. So to the extent that you can bring disease, philanthropy, and venture capital to mix, I just think that's an incredible model, and that really is what Vie Ventures is all about."

"The large disease-focused philanthropies have done a phenomenal job in funding basic science research coming out of academics and helping really define, well, what is autoimmune disease and what are the biological systems and why does that matter? And in fact, just taking the case of type 1 diabetes until the 1980s, we didn't even know that that was an autoimmune disease. And in an autoimmune disease, it's the body's immune system attacking a tissue that it shouldn't. And the consequence is that it manifests as a sort of disease. So a lot of the research foundation spent a good amount of time teasing out all that basic science, and that led to insights that then allow us to create new therapies to actually change the course of these diseases. And so as you roll the clock forward to where we are in 2026, that biology has been defined."

"So what Vie Ventures does is it really allows a way for these disease foundations to reach into the translation of that fundamental discovery research to actually fund drugs that are going into patients to hopefully result in an FDA approval. And that just hasn't been done in the past because the science hadn't been defined yet, but now we're at this very exciting time, and that's the next frontier."

#VieVentures #AutoimmuneDisease #VentureCapital #CARTTherapy #Immunology #PatientAdvocacy #Biotech #HealthcareInnovation #Type1Diabetes #MultipleSclerosis #Lupus #EmpoweredPatient #HealthcarePodcast #MedicalResearch #PatientCentricity #DiseasePhilanthropy #AutoimmuneDisorders #ImmuneOncology #VentureImpact

vieventures.com

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Ed Ahn, CEO of MEDIPOST, is developing next-generation stem cell therapies for inflammation-driven degenerative diseases with a primary focus on knee osteoarthritis. Using umbilical cord-derived stem cells, which have higher proliferation capacity than adult-derived stem cells, allows MEDIPOST to scale cell manufacturing and provide broader access to care. The company's lead program, Cartistem, has been approved in Korea for over 10 years, and new funding will accelerate US clinical trials.

Ed explains, "We are focused on treating inflammation-driven degenerative diseases. So all these diseases that you commonly associate with the aging process. Those are some of the things that we're very interested in slowing the progression of."

"We're actually going back to the source for neonatal stem cells from the cord blood. One of the primary advantages of going for a neonatal source of stem cells versus an adult source is that these are the most naive stem cells that one can obtain. And what I mean by naive is that they've been in a protected environment in the mother's womb. They have not been exposed to a lot of the different antigens that adults have been exposed to. So they're very immune-privileged compared to adult stem cells."

"I think this idea or the concern about cost can be applied to all sorts of regenerative medicines, whether or not they're gene therapies or cell therapies, they're amongst the most expensive therapies to manufacture for a company, primarily because we're building a process around an inherently biological process.

One of the advantages we have at MEDIPOST is that this product has been approved in Korea for over 10 years. So we have a tremendous amount of manufacturing experience and know-how from our parent company in Korea that we're able to apply to our manufacturing process in North America. And that really advances and matures our program far beyond other people in the field."

#MEDIPOST #CARTISTEM #StemCellTherapy #KneeOsteoarthritis #RegenerativeMedicine #Innovation #Healthcare #Biotech #ClinicalTrials #JointHealth #AntiAging #MedicalBreakthrough #BiotechInnovation

medipost.com

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