BTO_Irene Meier: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Welcome to Bite the Orange. Through our conversations, we create a roadmap for the future of health with the most impactful leaders in the space. This is your host, Dr. Manny Fombu. Let's make the future of healthcare a reality together.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another episode of Bite the Orange. Today we have a very special guest all the way from Switzerland to Brazil, right? And she's been a staunch advocate for digital health, you know, especially around your neurology kind of area. Please correct me if I'm wrong on it, but it's something I respect a lot and someone I look up to, and she's a big advocate in this particular field, especially around Alzheimer's and the work that she's done around it, and she's a real digital health transformer and she is certainly someone that we should listen to today. So once again, welcome to the show, Irene Meier.
Irene Meier:
Thank you very much, it's a privilege to be here.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Correct, so when I first met you, I mean, you have different roles in different companies, but your interest in research has stayed the same, and today you are with Reify Health. So tell us about yourself, first of all, who are you, right, and then tell us about Reify Health.
Irene Meier:
Yeah, fantastic. So you mentioned before Switzerland, Brazil. I'm originally from Switzerland. I studied in the US and then I moved back. Five years ago, I moved to Brazil, and so my background is in neuropsychology. And I did clinical neuroscience research for my PhD. So I focus on Alzheimer's disease research, mainly looking at brain-behavior relationships, and more specifically combining cognitive testing with neuroimaging and trying to understand the cerebrovascular risk factors that play into Alzheimer's disease and contribute to cognitive aging. And from there, I went to the United Nations to have a more global health impact preventing diabetes and hypertension, these two are some of the major risk factors for Alzheimer's disease. And I noticed on a mission to Haiti, which is one of the poorest countries of the Western Hemisphere, basically, that everybody had a cell phone. And so to me, that was really like kind of like a wake-up call, like this is a perfect way to deliver healthcare, and so I moved more into really digital health at that point afterwards in a pharma company at Roche in Switzerland, in Basel, where I developed a digital biomarker platform from for Alzheimer's disease. And then from there it moved back into kind of this startup world where I feel most at home. And that's kind of what's brought me to Reify Health and where I work today as Senior Lead of Sponsor Transformation. And we really focus on helping sponsors, pharma companies, enroll patients faster, and nowadays we work across different therapeutic areas and clinical trial phases, so I've moved away a little bit from specifically working on Alzheimer's disease to a broader impact.
Emmanuel Fombu:
That is great, but I think we skipped a major point that I would like to actually pull out of you. Why Alzheimer's and why did you pick that particular topic, like a personal reason why?
Irene Meier:
Ironically, no. I think even though it's like one of the most common forms of dementia, I'm not aware of any cases in my family, thankfully, but that was more of a kind of a coincidence. I think for like a long time I didn't know really what to do with myself. I didn't know what was what I was good at, I wasn't a good student either, but I always had an interest in healthcare and in human behavior, and also the technology aspect. And I always kind of liked to question the status quo and like, how do we improve things for patients or people or even like efficiencies in general? And so that kind of came naturally. I started working or studying like gerontopsychology, and so it started really like being interesting with these like brain imaging, and so that's how I kind of like fell into this a little bit. And initially, I worked more clinically as well, so I did like assessment for patients and, then sit down together with neurologists, look at the images as well and look at the neuropsychological assessment and we would discuss and then give feedback to the families and to patients, but that's just a very sad aspect of that work because there is no treatment available. And so I, I think there is a lot of people who are better suited for that kind of work as well, and this is just very, very heavy to me. And they have a more of like a creative mindset and this kind of like questioning things, and so I felt like research was the better fit for me, but I'm really happy I got that experience as well because I think is really helpful in formulating questions when you talk to the patients and the family members as well to kind of deliver better, better approaches for them as well. So that's kind of how we.
Emmanuel Fombu:
That being said, I read you have a very interesting perspective on healthcare, right? So you've been in New York, for example, at Columbia, you've been in Switzerland, and in South America right now. So it's in healthcare from very different perspectives. Tell us what healthcare looks like in Switzerland, what it looks like in America, what healthcare looks like in Brazil, right? Because a lot of people on the side think that there's no business in Brazil, like there's nothing happening there, right? This year I was actually fortunate to give a talk at a conference with the health department of Brazil, and I found out they had all these great digital health things that happen in there, in Portuguese. So tell us about that, how this landscape is like in Brazil.
Irene Meier:
Yeah, this is good.
Emmanuel Fombu:
No, please go. No, go for it.
Irene Meier:
It's a great question. I think we're looking at very different countries. You look at Switzerland, 8 million people. You look at Brazil, Rio de Janeiro has more than 8 million people just living in one city. So there's a lot of big differences. And I think Switzerland, I always feel like we have such a developed country, healthcare is mandatory, but you have to pay for it. And in the US, I wasn't exposed that long to it more in the research side, but in Brazil, like healthcare, the healthcare system is for free and is accessible for everyone, and I think.
Emmanuel Fombu:
That's in Brazil, you said, in Brazil?
Irene Meier:
In Brazil, it's for free, yes, and you get a lot of great doctors here. And I think the COVID vaccine rollout was like one of the best examples to show how things can work when we come together and work together. Brazil has historically already been very open to vaccines, very receptive. I think it's one of the countries with probably the highest vaccination rates in the world. And so even though the president didn't support it necessarily, like I think over 98% of the population is vaccinated. And not only we didn't get the vaccines in for a while, but once they arrived in Brazil, the rollout was incredibly fast and that went into the deepest areas, and your most remote areas of the Amazon rainforest, for example, and so that's just really, really impressive. And I think Brazilians are very, they have a lot of trust in their healthcare system. Historically, they've dealt with yellow fever outbreak in 2018 and the whole population was vaccinated in three months, I think, so that's really fascinating and what we can learn from. And then in Brazil, there are private healthcare providers as well. So there's a little bit of a differentiation there as well. And then in, Brazil, in general, is also very, very open to technology, to innovations, things that come from abroad, improving things as well, so they're incredibly open and it's very, very gratifying to work with Brazilians in general.
Emmanuel Fombu:
So how does the digital health community look like in Brazil? Do you have incubators like we have them in the US and in Switzerland?
Irene Meier:
Absolutely, those are probably more concentrated in like the bigger cities, so Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and then in Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte. So, and then there are a few, especially neurosciences, an incredibly interesting space here. We have a few Nobel Prize winners, but there's also a lot of great research. I think one of the problems, so to say, is that research alone doesn't pay too well in Brazil. So a lot of people do in their spare time and very limited resources, but the quality that comes out is amazing. And then there are a few universities that have accelerators. There's big, I myself used to work as well, so it's Brazil, which is the, like the connection in inside the consulate, the scientific arm of the consulate, so to say, to connect Swiss startups with Brazilian landscape and vice versa. And it's just like very, very open interest, of course, like a big and very interesting population here to work with from the north to the south. It's a huge country too, a lot of people with a lot of different varieties of people. So it's a great place to work with, and people are incredibly open.
Emmanuel Fombu:
With that being said, so the Reify example you just discussed, for example, how for the COVID vaccine, I went all the way to the rural areas. So tell me about Reify. How do you do clinical trial recruitment and how do you do it different?
Irene Meier:
So yeah, that's an excellent question. So what we do is the Studyteam, it's a software, StudyTeam is the software, and what it does is it provides a solution for both sites and sponsors to share information about managing patients during the enrollment period of clinical trials. And so that's across disease areas, therapeutic areas, and across different phases. And so what we do is we try, it's a platform to facilitate communication between the site and the sponsor, and you can really understand like where patients come from, why they're falling out in the recruitment funnel that can be related to inclusion or exclusion criteria related reasons, or it can also be other reasons, right? Again, we saw during COVID-19, a lot of people would drop out because they were worried about COVID, because they couldn't risk the exposure, because they didn't want to leave the house. So these are things that we're able to capture. And then it's really to manage patients, seamlessly report on patient progress in real-time as well, so it really facilitates and streamlines the communication between the site and the sponsor.
Emmanuel Fombu:
So we should, the ideal customer, we should target customer, are you looking at sponsors, are you looking at CROs, sites? So we should target customers.
Irene Meier:
Yeah, we do, it's a great question. We do work with sites, so sites can enter the data and really manage all of their enrollment work in the platform for StudyTeam for sites. And then on the other hand, we work with the sponsor, so that can be on CRA level who will have access to StudyTeam for sponsors and really see that recruitment of patients as they progress through the funnel. But then also on a more global trial level, like the trial leads can see really the enrollment across the entire trial can look into regional differences as well, maybe as we see let's go back to, let's say, criteria, for example, you can filter that by region, maybe filter out trends very, very early in the process already is a much earlier and of course, much faster than what used to happen through paper-pencil assessments.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which is very interesting. If you're a listener listening to this podcast right now and you are hearing about clinical trials for the first time, what everyone is talking about is something that actually improves life significantly, getting drugs to market much faster. So it's very critical what you're doing. So where is Reify located and how you guys lowball? Is it US company, only in the US? So if someone is listening and they want to participate with you guys, are you global? Where are you guys?
Irene Meier:
Absolutely, yes, the company is headquartered in Boston, but we are a global company, so we have people all over the world. Really, what we want to do is, is make sure that we serve the sites in their time zone. We offer trainings for sites in a lot of local languages as well, just to make sure that we really cater to customer, make sure to make their lives easy. We listen to the sites' workflow. We make sure it's not disruptive to their process, but really fits into what they're doing and trying to make their lives easier and not harder so it doesn't become yet another thing that they have to do, but really the one thing where they want to do their prescreening work.
Emmanuel Fombu:
So what has been the biggest challenge so far?
Irene Meier:
It's a great question. So from what I know is, I think sometimes for places where maybe things have been like paper, pencil based for like a long time, I think like switching to digital versions can be like a big undertaking, like digital transformation sometimes can be a step. But we do find that over 90% of sites, when they see the platform, when we do the demo, they end up actually using switching to the platform. So that's very encouraging, and there are benefits to use the system for sure.
Emmanuel Fombu:
So what are the next immediate steps for Reify in the next couple of months? What does success look like? Because I want to follow up with you at the next conversation, right, and I want to see how you guys are progressing.
Irene Meier:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, months is a great question in terms of clinical trials, because, of course, that takes a lot of time. Clinical trials take a lot of time, and that's the only thing we can't accelerate or can't skip, basically. But what we do or think the way we can contribute the best is really just keeping, getting engaged, and engaging more with sites, getting more sites to use the system as well, and then generally accelerate clinical trial prescreening and enrollment across trials, across areas, across different sponsor users. And then in terms of research, again, it takes a long, long time. But if you look at, again, COVID example, again, we saw how much we can accelerate the approval of a drug or a vaccine or any treatment if we kind of all come together and work together for pulling the same strings.
Emmanuel Fombu:
That is quite great, actually. And I spent some time talking to people around like clinical trials, EPROs, and I find out it's so deep, deep, deep, this whole layer, it goes, it goes pretty deep. But I am saying right now, if anyone listening to this and are a site, then you are a great client for Reify. I think you should go out there and support Irene, which she's a big, I'm quite impressed by her accomplishments, and other publications that she's done, and I really I'd like to invite you again another episode of Bite the Orange to discuss your Alzheimer's research during COVID. I'd be interested in that piece as well, right? But for the meantime, Reify, please support Irene, and make sure that that movement, is accomplished. So thank you, Irene, for joining us today.
Irene Meier:
Yeah, thank you very much. It was great talking to you. Thanks a lot for the opportunity.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Of course.
Irene Meier:
Bye.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Bye.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Thank you for listening to Bite the Orange. If you want to change healthcare with us, please contact us at info@EmmanuelFombu.com, or you can visit us at EmmanuelFombu.com or BitetheOrange.com. If you liked this episode and want more information about us, you could also visit us at EmmanuelFombu.com.
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