YouSaid · the spoken record

Charles Strom

lines on the record: 74
first: 2022-06-17
most recent: 2022-06-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Who gets long COVID, who dies, and then correlate that with our antibody levels and see if our hypotheses are correct. The problem is, as far as I know, nobody is doing these sorts of tests because the blood tests are only semi-quantitive at the moment. The quantitative tests are expensive to do, and this study would be very expensive to perform. So it frustrates me is I believe we have a tool we published on this in peer review publications, where we could do these sorts of studies, we could get the information because COVID is not going away. That's the one thing that's sure. This is going to be part of our lives for the foreseeable future. And we need to start getting information that will allow physicians and people to make informed decisions about things like vaccines. For example, what it...”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or when so, you know, we have that luxury of those who have participated in our trial, of knowing that our levels are stable over time. Again, this is a personal decision that I'm making with myself and my physician. I can't say that there's a recommendation about this sort of thing. But this is the kind of data that we need. The beauty of our test is that we could actually get the data that would inform these kinds of decisions. So we could look at a whole bunch of people, say, you know, everybody in a city or everybody in a large company. And we could test people every month for their quantitative antibody levels, and then we can follow them and see who gets COVID, who doesn't get COVID, who goes into the hospital.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Baron, that's a great point. So, you know, the issue is, you know, I know now that after my third booster, the third shot, so the first booster, that my level's now eight months out are the same as they were two weeks after my third booster. So I don't feel that at this moment I need a fourth booster. And there's no data to say that that's good or bad. Unfortunately, FDA says that a person of my age could get a fourth shot if I wanted, but there is no reasonable way for me to make that decision right now. A lot of my friends that said, I'm going to take the four shot. Your point is well taken that if you take the four shot, who knows if you're going to be able to get a fifth shot.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other beauty of this test is because it's saliva-based, you don't have to have your blood drawn and it's relatively inexpensive, you can have multiple tests. So for example, we have a clinical trial going, which I'm a participant, where we looked at people's levels every two weeks for six months. And when we looked at that, we could see that most people's levels went up after their second vaccination, but then they slowly came down so that from four to six months, they were almost back down to baseline, which would mean that we could have probably predicted that you were going to need a booster after six months.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's correct. They'll barry PCR doesn't measure antibodies. PCR measures viruses. Yes, most of the, well, all of the home tests are qualitative. They're not quantitative, which means they tell you positive or negative. The laboratory tests are what's called semi-quantitative. They give you a number that's pretty meaningless. It says 3.1 or 3.2, and you don't really know what to do about it. Our test actually gives you the level of your antibody. And then we also tell you how you stand with respect to several thousand samples that we have from individuals who have been vaccinated. So it'll say, Barry, your level is 4.2 nanagram.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The disease. So people often had to have biopsies, and most people didn't want to have a biopsy of a salivary gland. So he began to use our platform, Imperial platform, to look for antibodies in saliva. And it turns out that that is a much better way of diagnosing Chogren syndrome than in blood. So we knew that we could use this platform for antibodies. So I remember it was mid-February and the beginning of the pandemic, and I said to our group at Liquid Diagnostics, you know, I think we could use this to measure COVID antibodies. And I remember Bob said, well, you know, how much is that going to cost? And they said, well, you know, maybe, you know, $500 or $10,000 to buy the reagents or things. And the rest, they say, is history. We were able to make a saliva-based diagnostic, which is quantitative, which is very different from almost all other antibody measuring tests available that can measure your immunoglobulin.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, interesting story. So, Dr. Wong is a dentist and he had an incredible interest in a disease called Schoburn syndrome. Shogren syndrome is an autoimmune disease where the body attacks itself, and it causes dry mouth and dry eyes. There's actually 4 million people who present to their physicians every year with that complaint, either dry mouth, dry eyes, or both. It was known that some of these patients who present with dry mouth and dry eyes actually have a disorder called Shogren syndrome, which is where the salivary glands make where antibodies are made that attack the salivary glands. The diagnosis of Shogren syndrome was incredibly difficult because the blood-based antibodies were not particularly sensitive or specific for”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're in the middle of it. We have not yet done any of the data analysis. Right now we're collecting. We're collecting samples and they'll be analyzed actually next year. So I can't tell you how it's going, but we're hoping that it's going to give us positive results.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cancer or not. And we have an NIH funded study to use our platform to look at these patients with indeterminate nodules using either saliva or plasma or both to see if we can inform the decision about who needs a biopsy and who doesn't need a biopsy. And how are the results of that?”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. About 80% of lung cancer now is diagnosed at stages three to four where it's not curable You can be treated, it can prolong your life, but basically you're going to die of lung cancer. Stage one and two, which is what we call early stage lung cancer, it is still potentially curable with both surgery and chemotherapy or a combination of both. And that's why it's so important to diagnose this early. But 80% of the time, it's not. There is a screening test now that's available, which is a spiral CT scan for people who have long histories of smoking. And the problem with spiral CT scanning is that you get these things called indeterminate nodules. So some people have, you do the CT scan and it's, oh, this has got to be cancer. Sometimes you do the CT scan and it's negative. But about 30% of the time you do the CT scan and there's something there, but you don't know whether it's...”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amico, Jeff Weisberg, who started a phenotics, one of the major neurology diagnostics companies and was a financial guy. And my friend Rich Bender, who was a medical oncologist, all of these people I knew from past life, Bob, what I knew from Little League and the other two I had met at Quest Diagnostics.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A wonderful collaboration. And I became blown away by the potential of this platform. The problem is that Dr. Wong was an academic. He had no idea of how to commercialize anything. I had come from 16 years in the diagnostic industry. So my expertise was complementary to his. I knew how to make assays that could be used hundreds of thousands of times and give accurate results. I was very excited. But in order to commercialize the intellectual property has to be in order, there has to be an organization. There has to be funding. And then I reached out to friends of mine who were also leaders in their field. Bob Agdern, who was an executive in Amako for many years, was a lawyer and ran businesses for”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he said, Let me show you what I got here. And he had developed a platform which at that time was called eFirm. We now call it Imperial, which could do diagnostics of any biomolecule, including DNA, including antibodies, including protein, on saliva as an open platform. And he had used this to actually demonstrate that he could detect circulating tumor DNA in patients with early stage lung cancer, something that had never been done before successfully. I looked at this data and it knocked my socks off and I said, you know, baby, I want to work with you here. So if it began a”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The pathologist who had co written that grant had left the institution, and so she says, you've got to go up, see what's going on, and see what we can do. So I take the elevator up to the seventh floor, the basic science building at UCLA, and I go up to meet with Dr. Wong, and it was like, oh my God, that's the guy because I had met him about 10 years previously when he had given a talk at Quest Diagnostic. And he had dedicated his life to saliva-based diagnostics. And when he gave a talk, I was blown away and said to myself and came home and said to my wife, you know, this guy's a visionary. And we had lunch afterwards and we had a wonderful talk. And it was like, you know, a rom-com. We saw each other in the hallway and it was fun.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I had worked at Quest Diagnostics for 16 years basically running all the genetics laboratories and after I left I took a temporary position to be the director of the molecular pathology laboratories at UCLA. This was because of they were trying to recruit a permanent director. I was in semi-retirement and so you know I took a temporary job working up at UCLA for a couple of days a week. Then one day my boss calls me in and she says Buck we have a problem. There is a dentist in the dental school by the name of David Wong who has just gotten a grant. And part of the grant was that our laboratory would validate the test as a laboratory developed test so it could be offered clinically.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had actually murdered his wife and then burned her body to near completion in a steel drum in his garage. Then he went to the police station and decided to confess. And then when he got an attorney, he withdrew his confession. So the prosecutors kind of knew that he had done it, but had no way there was no body to be identified. So we were able actually to identify his wife from the charred remains in this steel drum. And the Fry evidence was accepted and he was convicted. So that was basically my moment in the sun and forensics and I never really did anything after that.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I could do DNA testing to support their cases and being an academics and having some academic freedom, I said yes and did some DNA testing and in legal in Illinois, I don't know if this is around the United States or something called a Fry hearing where before laboratory evidence can be introduced in court it has to pass a certain amount of standards whether it's generally accepted in a scientific community whether it's reliable those sorts of things and so I participated in several FRI hearings in Illinois to allow the admission of DNA testing and forensics and my famous case the one I published about was a gentleman who”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And put it into practice. So I was a professor at University of Chicago DNA testing for forensics was just in its infancy. There was the blooding. I don't know if you remember that where an entire village was genotyped in England to find a rapist. And forensics DNA had not yet been admitted into courts in Illinois. I was approached by several different prosecutors who had very difficult cases and asked if I could”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I've always been what I call an applied scientist. You know, the scientists out there really come in two forms. One is the basic scientist, the person that really wants to delve incredibly deeply into one particular problem. There used to be a saying about medical practitioners that the general practitioner knows nothing about everything, that the specialist knows everything about nothing, and the pathologist knows everything about everything, but it's too late to do any good. So the basic scientist delves very deeply into a single subject. I always was more interested in how are we going to use these developments to help people in particular, the medical aspect. Now they would call it translational medicine. But how are we going to take what we learn as a”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, from a very early age, I was interested in developmental biology, which is the science studying the mechanisms by which we go from an embryo in which all cells are identical to an adult where we have hundreds of different specialized cells. And Albert Dorfman, my mentor at University of Chicago, was working on the differentiation of cartilage in chickens. So I was cutting off limb buds from nine dozen chickens a week and growing them in tissue culture, and they would differentiate into mature chondrocytes, into mature cartilage cells and tissue culture. And so I worked on that. sequencing, DNA analysis was available. When cloning started, gene cloning, I got a grant to clone the gene for humans cartilage-specific collagen and to see how that got turned on during development. It was very exciting.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went to medical school, got my MD, got my PhD, the obvious choice for me to do a residency was at University of California, San Diego, where Dr. Nyan had become the chairman of the department. So that was just a no-brainer. So I ended up doing my residency there. And for the three years of my residency and fellowship, I worked with William Nyhan, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of biochemical genetics. And it was just a fabulous experience for me.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, that was fabulous. So, again, this was a cold call. I started out between my freshman in sophomore year of college. And my advisor and the master of my college was a scientist named Richard Goldsby. And he said, hey, I have a buddy, Dr. William Nyhan, out in San Diego. Maybe I could send a letter and you could go out and work for him over the summer between your freshman and sophomore year in college. And it was like, you know, somebody asking me if I wanted to work for the Pope. And I said, yeah, sure, of course I do. And same thing. He welcomed me. He had me in the laboratory and he and his partner, Larry Sweetman, got me hooked on biochemical genetics. And then after I...”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was called the Medical Scientist Training Program was a federally funded program. It paid for my tuition and gave me a living stipend as a six-year program turned my MD and PhD. So yeah, it was always my plan to be a medical scientist.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, from the time I was in seventh grade, I knew I wanted to be a scientist. And as an undergraduate, I became interested in prenatal diagnosis in particular. And when I was an undergraduate, I did research and found that one of the centers to do that research was at University of Chicago. And one of my early mentors, Albert Dorfman, had published a paper on prenatal diagnosis for Hunter syndrome. So I actually sent him a letter, typed it out on my Smith Corona electric typewriter, sent it to him, and lo and behold, a month later, I got a packet of information saying, how would you like to come work in my lab over the summer? And that led to my entering an MD PhD program.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source