Functional Drug Testing Combined with AI Transforming Cancer Care with Jim Foote First Ascent Biomedical
Release Date: 12/02/2025
Hospital Leaders Prioritize Combating Inefficiencies with Susan Grant symplr TRANSCRIPT
Empowered Patient Podcast
Susan Grant, Chief Clinical Officer at symplr, reviews findings from their annual Compass Survey, which revealed the significant challenges hospitals face, driven by financial pressures, clinician burnout, and operational inefficiencies. Fragmented technology systems create significant administrative burdens, and there is growing recognition that unifying healthcare operations and strategically implementing AI are crucial to streamlining workflows. Clinicians' involvement in the design and implementation of new processes and procedures is essential to ensure that patients' real-world...
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Hospital Leaders Prioritize Combating Inefficiencies with Susan Grant symplr
Empowered Patient Podcast
Susan Grant, Chief Clinical Officer at symplr, reviews findings from their annual Compass Survey, which revealed the significant challenges hospitals face, driven by financial pressures, clinician burnout, and operational inefficiencies. Fragmented technology systems create significant administrative burdens, and there is growing recognition that unifying healthcare operations and strategically implementing AI are crucial to streamlining workflows. Clinicians' involvement in the design and implementation of new processes and procedures is essential to ensure that patients' real-world...
info_outline
Optimizing Provider-Payer Workflow by Addressing Inefficiencies with Fawad Butt Penguin AI TRANSCRIPT
Empowered Patient Podcast
Fawad Butt, Co-Founder and CEO of Penguin AI, is addressing the workflow challenges faced by healthcare payers and providers, particularly in prior authorizations and claims adjudications. These processes are inefficient and often yield inconsistent results because human reviewers interpret rules differently, and patients are denied care due to minor administrative errors. Penguin AI is bringing consistency and speed to adjudication, breaking down data silos and handling non-clinical administrative work, enabling agents to address patient-specific problems and ensure...
info_outline
Optimizing Provider-Payer Workflow by Addressing Inefficiencies with Fawad Butt Penguin AI
Empowered Patient Podcast
Fawad Butt, Co-Founder and CEO of Penguin AI, is addressing the workflow challenges faced by healthcare payers and providers, particularly in prior authorizations and claims adjudications. These processes are inefficient and often yield inconsistent results because human reviewers interpret rules differently, and patients are denied care due to minor administrative errors. Penguin AI is bringing consistency and speed to adjudication, breaking down data silos and handling non-clinical administrative work, enabling agents to address patient-specific problems and ensure...
info_outline
Utilizing Largest Coded Medical Library and AI to Create Unified Visual Patient Narratives with Alexander Tsiaras StoryMD TRANSCRIPT
Empowered Patient Podcast
Alexander Tsiaras, CEO and Founder of StoryMD, is addressing the critical problem of the fragmented health information landscape. The StoryMD platform unifies a patient's health history, including clinical records, wearable data, and personal diary entries, along with relevant data from a vast validated medical library of text and strong visualizations. This provides a coherent narrative about the patient that informs the patient, their healthcare providers, and caregivers, enabling more informed decisions and better outcomes. Alexander explains, "So one of the huge problems that we...
info_outline
Utilizing Largest Coded Medical Library and AI to Create Unified Visual Patient Narratives with Alexander Tsiaras StoryMD
Empowered Patient Podcast
Alexander Tsiaras, CEO and Founder of StoryMD, is addressing the critical problem of the fragmented health information landscape. The StoryMD platform unifies a patient's health history, including clinical records, wearable data, and personal diary entries, along with relevant data from a vast validated medical library of text and strong visualizations. This provides a coherent narrative about the patient that informs the patient, their healthcare providers, and caregivers, enabling more informed decisions and better outcomes. Alexander explains, "So one of the huge problems that we...
info_outline
AI Agent Connects Patients to Untapped Financial Support with Seth Cohen Cedar TRANSCRIPT
Empowered Patient Podcast
Seth Cohen, President of Cedar, is addressing the affordability of health care by shifting the emphasis from billing functionality to patient financial navigation by using technology to connect patients to underutilized financial resources. The Cedar Cover platform is designed to identify and enroll eligible uninsured or underinsured patients into Medicaid, ACA, available pharmaceutical copay subsidies, and untapped Health Savings Accounts, which can be used retrospectively to cover previous medical and ongoing bills, benefiting the patient and providers. An AI agent handles patient service...
info_outline
AI Agent Connects Patients to Untapped Financial Support with Seth Cohen Cedar
Empowered Patient Podcast
Seth Cohen, President of Cedar, is addressing the affordability of health care by shifting the emphasis from billing functionality to patient financial navigation by using technology to connect patients to underutilized financial resources. The Cedar Cover platform is designed to identify and enroll eligible uninsured or underinsured patients into Medicaid, ACA, available pharmaceutical copay subsidies, and untapped Health Savings Accounts, which can be used retrospectively to cover previous medical and ongoing bills, benefiting the patient and providers. An AI agent handles patient service...
info_outline
Functional Drug Testing Combined with AI Transforming Cancer Care with Jim Foote First Ascent Biomedical TRANSCRIPT
Empowered Patient Podcast
Jim Foote, Co-Founder and CEO of First Ascent Biomedical, is changing the standard of care for cancer treatment from 'try and hope' to 'test and treat'. The First Ascent platform combines functional drug testing of fresh biopsies, genomic sequencing, and an AI engine to assess a large panel of drugs and identify the most likely to be effective. Clinical data show a high correlation between how cancer cells respond in the lab test and how patients respond to the same drug, and is seen as a treatment guide for refractory cancer patients to identify novel drug combinations. Jim explains,...
info_outline
Functional Drug Testing Combined with AI Transforming Cancer Care with Jim Foote First Ascent Biomedical
Empowered Patient Podcast
Jim Foote, Co-Founder and CEO of First Ascent Biomedical, is changing the standard of care for cancer treatment from 'try and hope' to 'test and treat'. The First Ascent platform combines functional drug testing of fresh biopsies, genomic sequencing, and an AI engine to assess a large panel of drugs and identify the most likely to be effective. Clinical data show a high correlation between how cancer cells respond in the lab test and how patients respond to the same drug, and is seen as a treatment guide for refractory cancer patients to identify novel drug combinations. Jim explains,...
info_outlineJim Foote, Co-Founder and CEO of First Ascent Biomedical, is changing the standard of care for cancer treatment from 'try and hope' to 'test and treat'. The First Ascent platform combines functional drug testing of fresh biopsies, genomic sequencing, and an AI engine to assess a large panel of drugs and identify the most likely to be effective. Clinical data show a high correlation between how cancer cells respond in the lab test and how patients respond to the same drug, and is seen as a treatment guide for refractory cancer patients to identify novel drug combinations.
Jim explains, "Fundamentally speaking, if we look at everybody on this planet from a DNA and RNA perspective, there are 8 billion people, and each one of us is different from the others due to our DNA and RNA. So if we acknowledge that biologically we're all different, then the problem that we're trying to solve is if we're all different, why are we treating each patient with the same standard of care? A process that has existed for a hundred years, and again, they've made substantial advancements, but functional precision medicine is really an opportunity to move away from a standard that's based on the laws of averages and really treat people based on an individual level, developed by results that come from their individual biology."
"In oncology, these practices and standards have been developed over decades. And in some situations, some of these cancer protocols haven't been updated in decades. There had been continual advancements in things like immunotherapy. What I'll say is that in oncology, they're always looking for the silver bullet. It's in the genome, it's in a biomarker, it's in immuno-oncology, it's in an organoid, it's in all of those types of things. So they have always tried to find that silver bullet. Fundamentally, what we do in First Ascent is that we believe that we have enough bullets, per se. We have enough drugs, per se. We're just not using them in the right ways. "
#FirstAscentBiomedical #Cancer #Oncology
