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GUEST BIO
Paul Y. Song is an MD, entrepreneur and health activist. He is currently CEO of NKGen Biotech. Dr. Song served as the very first visiting fellow on healthcare policy in the California Department of Insurance in 2013. His last clinical role was Asst. Professor at the Samuel Oschin Cancer Center at Cedars Sinai Medical Center. He currently serves on several boards including: the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago Mercy Corps, The Center for Health and Democracy, Gideon’s Promise, and Progressive Democrats of America. Dr. Song graduated with honors from the University of Chicago and received his M.D. degree from George Washington University. He completed his residency in radiation oncology at the University of Chicago.
DEFINITIONS
- – Single-payer healthcare: A type of universal healthcare in which the costs of essential healthcare for all residents are covered by a single public system (hence “single-payer”). Single-payer systems may contract for healthcare services from private organizations (as is the case in Canada) or may own and employ healthcare resources and personnel (as is the case in the United Kingdom).
- – Medicare: A government national health insurance program in the United States. It primarily provides health insurance for Americans aged 65 and older, as well as for disabled people.
MENTIONED
- Natural Killer Cells – Alzheimer’s Clinical Trials
- Physicians for a National Health Program
- Courage CA
TAKEAWAYS
- Alliances are powerful. Finding common goals across movements can amplify each of their individual causes more effectively.
- A single payer system isn’t just better for patients, but also for doctors, who won’t have to spend resources fighting insurance companies, or worrying about malpractice insurance.
- In reality, US patients are not really free to choose their providers. Most of the time, the insurance provider is the one dictating who you have access to, and what medication you’re allowed to take under their coverage.
- As long as our politicians remain beholden to the insurance lobby, we will not get universal healthcare.
- A new therapy using the patient’s own natural killer cells may be the key for Alzheimers, Parkinsons and Cancer patients.
CONTACT
Instagram | TikTok | Web | LinkedIn | Twitter
Host: Lazou
Additional Music Links:
Nuances Podcast – curated Spotify | Apple Music playlists with past guests, hosts & more Asian diaspora artists.
Video with captions
Transcript
LAZOU: Our guest today is Dr. Paul Y. Song. Paul is a MD entrepreneur and health activist. He’s currently the CEO of NK Gen Biotech. Dr. Song served as the first visiting fellow on healthcare policy in California Department of Insurance in 2013. His last clinical role was assistant professor at the Samuel Ochin Cancer Center at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center. He currently serves on several boards including the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, Mercy Corps, the Center for Health and Democracy, Gideon’s Promise, and Progressive Democrats of America.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
Dr. Paul Y. Song: Thanks for having me.
LAZOU: So start from the beginning. Where’d you grow up and what was that like?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: So I grew up quite a long time ago in a little town outside of New York City. I was born in Queens in Jackson Heights, New York. And then my family slowly moved to the suburbs first Jersey City and then Maplewood, and then ultimately Short Hills. Now when you look at Jackson Height or Queens in general, and you see this big melting pot, tremendous amount of Asian, some of the best Asian food in the world. But at the time when I was born there, there were very few Asians at all. And that was the environment that my sister and I really grew up in, throughout our whole life, where we were maybe one of two or three Asian families in our community.
LAZOU: Yeah. So did you always want to become a doctor?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: I always had a, an interest in taking care of patients. I think I remember being like five or six and my grandmother had cut herself really bad, and no one else was home and I had to bandage her hand and remember what a high that was. And then hearing then President Richard Nixon declare war on cancer not knowing what cancer was.
But that started to really get me interested in cancer. But I was not your typical Asian kid in the sense that my parents never pushed me to pursue medicine. They didn’t pursue my sister or I to be their doctors or lawyers. In fact, when I had first gotten into medical school and called home the first thing my parents said were, are you sure this is what you wanna do?
Don’t do it because this is what you think we want you to do. If it was up to them, I think they would’ve preferred I became a pastor. But that wasn’t the calling that I felt, but. Yeah, I always felt like medicine was something that was really cool, and to be able to take care of patients and people was something that I always aspired to do.
LAZOU: That’s pretty awesome. So you’re part of the Council of Korean Americans. Has your Asian identity always been an important part of your professional life? How did that come about?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: It’s really something I’ve felt more comfortable and grown into as I’ve gotten older. As I mentioned, my sister and I, we were one of very few Asians in our elementary school, high school. I endured a lot of racial taunting and bullying as a child. So if anything, I tried to assimilate and become as white as possible and run away from my asianness. And because I didn’t have really any Asian friends and grew up in a environment where my parents felt that it was best to prepare me to try to speak English as best as possible, we didn’t speak Korean at home.
I really became pretty whitewashed by the time I graduated high school. And then just seeing my parents, the way they assimilated, they put their heads down. They worked hard as immigrants, never tried to make any waves. It was one of those things where I think I really hid my asianness as much as you could. But I think as I got older, no matter how assimilated I felt I was, I started to always see people view me differently just because physically, no matter how white we try to be, we’re never gonna get there because of just these eyes and our hair, right? And then as I finally felt more comfortable in who I was, I really started to learn more about my past, my ancestors.
And then really started to embrace the asianness. And I think when I moved to California and particularly in Los Angeles, when you walk around, you see so many people that look like you. You realize you don’t have to hide. If anything, you can embrace it and fully. I’d be proud of it.
So I came to this late and I think it wasn’t until maybe in my early forties where I started to really adopt a strong sense of who I was and of being proud of being Asian American. I think it was just the time where my sister and I were born in the, sixties that there were only a handful of Koreans or Asians really, that were in any place that we lived.
LAZOU: Yeah, so even as a doctor practicing, you would find people treating you differently because you’re Asian.
Dr. Paul Y. Song: Yeah, I remember third year of medical school is when you transfer from the class into the clinic, and you’re actually learning how to take care of patients. And I remember being in Washington, DC and going up to a patient and asking them some questions, starting to examine them, and the patient said to me, oh, do you speak Oriental? And it was one of those things where I realized that I was never gonna be fully viewed as an American. And I think that continued throughout my career. Fortunately I think in medicine, I didn’t really experience any racism in the clinics or through that, but it was something where uh, as a physician never felt very comfortable in my own skin as an Asian American until later in life.
LAZOU: Yeah. So you’ve become a healthcare activist. When did you first become interested in al advocating for healthcare access?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: That’s one of the things when I went to medical school in the late eighties, early nineties. There were no classes on healthcare policy. There were no classes on how the insurance system worked and what was good and bad about our healthcare policy. So after I had worked really hard during my medical school years and then residency now all of a sudden I have a job. I was working as a radiation oncologist taking care of cancer patients, and one of the things that you start to see is: a lot of patients who’ve been battling cancer for many years who’ve done everything right, they’ve worked hard, they were insured, they took care of themselves, and yet they came down with this unfortunate illness. And I started to see too many of my patients get harmed by the system. Not just their cancer, but by the system. Many of them were facing financial ruin. They were constantly fighting with insurance companies to figure out how they could get coverage that should be paid for. Many of them had reached their lifetime caps on their deductibles and So they were basically tapping into life savings. I started to realize that this healthcare system was not as great as we had been told it was. The biggest, I think, lie that has been perpetuated as we have the best healthcare system in the world, and I soon realized that we did not and there were two things that could happen like professionally.
I was doing well, became a partner in my group and was financially making, great money compared to what my parents and I made. And yet I couldn’t ignore what was happening to patients. So the more I started to independently research what was wrong with our healthcare system I really became sort of sick to my stomach and really sad and depressed about the state of our healthcare system and what we had.
I wanted to get involved and start to advocate for a better system, bring attention to the problems that existed with our healthcare system. And initially when I started to speak out for Medicare for All, which I soon realized was the best system, I had doctors who were used to their cushy lifestyles really get angry at me and threaten not to send patients to me anymore.
But it was one of those things where I just couldn’t be silent and I couldn’t continue to perpetuate a a moral broken system.
If anything, I had to try to bring more attention to it, speak out against it and really try to advocate more for our patients. Ultimately, that’s what we do when we are taking the Hippocratic oath when we graduate from medical school, is that we are advocating that we will continuously look out for the benefit of our patients. And I just felt this whole healthcare system was very much against what we should be advocating for.
LAZOU: Yeah, so you mentioned that some of your patients were maxing out on the insurance policies. I know that the system is broken, but like I didn’t know that there was a cap where they don’t cover your cancer treatment. So the patient used up all their deductibles.
So they’re supposed to be covered for everything after their deductible. But you’re saying that’s not what
Dr. Paul Y. Song: No. So prior to the Affordable Care Act, which is now, what, 10 years old, there was a lifetime cap. So let’s say over the course of 10 years, all of your healthcare costs over, I forget what it was back then. It was like maybe 1.5 million or something like that.
you look at a woman with metastatic breast cancer who’s been battling this for 15 years it’s easy to use that lifetime maximum, and as a result, then insurance no longer would cover anything that, that’s what I meant. Not so much the but there was a lifetime cap. The Affordable Care Act, while it fell short of a lot of things, it did eliminate that lifetime cap so that people no longer have to worry about running out of insurance coverage.
It just gets more expensive to maintain coverage, but at least they don’t run into that. But you have to realize I started practicing. In 1996, that was the first year I had finished residency and was practicing. And so from 1996 to, I think the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2006 or no, 2008, you’re looking at a 12 year period where too many of my patients were running into that situation.
LAZOU: Yeah, in 2017, I think you wrote a bunch of articles and some of them you mentioned that 2.7 million Californians and overall 29 million Americans are uninsured and many of whom are communities of color or undocumented. Can you talk about how that affects the Asian diaspora specifically?
I think one thing that we don’t think about enough is just how much diversity there is in the Asian diaspora and the disparities in terms of income, but also insurance and all the access to healthcare.
Dr. Paul Y. Song: It’s a great point. That’s the idea of this whole model minority or that we are just all successful is not true. I think there are incredible amounts of people in California and elsewhere who have tremendous financial difficulty who are living well below the poverty line in multi-generational families who are doing three, four jobs to just make ends meet. And a lot of these people don’t have healthcare coverage. Also if you look at prior to the Affordable Care Act there were a lot of single business owners. A lot of Asians come here. They may have had been educated overseas, but their skills, like I know quite a few, my parents’ friends who majored in political science in Korea, when they came here, their degree couldn’t be used for anything and they ended up opening their own grocery stores or little dry cleaners and things, and then they would have to try to figure out how to give themselves healthcare coverage. So if you look at the number of Asians that lack healthcare coverage, it’s actually not small and depending on the level of poverty, quite a few Asians are left behind.
They can’t pay for premium and because maybe of their undocumented status have not been able be eligible for Medi-Cal, which is the state run coverage. In the state of California right now, one out of three Californians is actually covered by Medi-Cal. One of the new laws that went into effect just a few days ago, was that any undocumented person living in California would now be eligible for Medi-Cal. That’s one good thing that will help many members of the AAPI community.
But that is the biggest misconception that somehow our community’s got it all together, that we have all our ducks lined up, that we have no financial difficulties. There are so many members of our community who are struggling, who are living in poverty, and who have not been able to get the coverage they need. So as a result, they sit on medical problems longer and longer. So when they finally end up going to the emergency room, it’s so far advanced that it’s many times too far gone.
LAZOU: Yeah. one other thing you mentioned in your article was how healthcare premiums had more than doubled over the last decade. How much worse has it gotten since the pandemic?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: It’s interesting. During the pandemic it wasn’t bad because the government was subsidizing a lot of that, right? A lot of people had lost their jobs and they were providing some coverage. And also because of the pandemic, most people were not seeing doctors having elective surgery and things.
The cost for insurance companies during that time was actually relatively low. Now, post pandemic, you’re seeing premiums go back up. This last year for 20 23, the average premium went up about 7%. And the issue is this, the Affordable Care Act, while it did a lot of good things, it ignored two things. One was it didn’t do any pharmaceutical drug pricing control. And as a result, that’s why a lot of people can’t afford their drugs, even to this day. And then it didn’t allow for insurance rate regulation. And as we mentioned, even though the Affordable Care Act did a lot of good things in the last 10 years, premiums have gone up dramatically. They’ve essentially doubled over the last 12 years, those are the areas that we still need work on, but unfortunately, too many members of Congress and even our president are too friendly with the insurance industry and they’re never gonna pass legislation to really look out for patients and consumers the way it should be.
LAZOU: Yeah. What should insurance companies role be if we were to migrate to a single payer system, do we get rid of them?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: It really depends on how the single payer system would ever be structured. One. I think in this typical political environment, the chances of us getting a single payer Medicare for All system is very small. Even when we had a Democratic president and had control of the House and Senate, the best we could do was the Affordable Care Act, and we didn’t even have a public option in that. So I think that it’s gonna be a long time before we ever get that if we ever get it. But if we were to get one, I think what we would do is the government would offer basic healthcare coverage to every single person in the United States, regardless of ability to pay. That would cover all of the standard things that we need. Now, there would be room, I think, for private insurance companies to offer supplemental insurance like you see in the uk, right? The United Kingdom, they have a socialized medical system where the government owns and operates all aspects of it. But you can apply for supplemental coverage so that if you want to get a private bed, they can pay extra for that. And those types of things. I think the insurance industry should be allowed to offer supplemental insurance. I just don’t think they should be at the front of the line trying to make the biggest decisions on what we should and should not get as far as care. Also, I do think that when you have for-profit insurance companies that are only really looking at making as much profit as possible to satisfy their stockholders it they’re at odds with you and I, right? They don’t want to cover coverage. They don’t want to try to take care of us the way maybe the medical dogma says it should be done, we’ll treat you the cheapest way possible so that we can maximize our profits. I think when you have an industry whose intentions and also whose interests are not aligned with us, the patient or the consumer it’s a recipe for failure and that’s what you’re seeing.
LAZOU: Yeah. I recently learned that the people who approve or deny our requests at insurance companies are not medically trained professionals. And I was like, wait, how does that. How does that make sense? How do they know what treatment I need if they’re not doctors?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: It’s even worse. As an oncologist, when I was taking care of patients and I would just follow the way we were trained based on published scientific clinical trials, how to treat this patient, and I would put in an order to take care of this patient. I would get some case manager from an insurance company saying no, we don’t want you to do that.
We’d like you to do this. And then I’d say, okay, can I have your background? And one chances are they never took care of the patient before, as you mentioned. Or if they did, it was like in some specialty that had nothing to do with cancer, and here they were telling me the cancer specialist, how I should take care of my patient. They’re really following cost benefit algorithms rather than what published literature says how we should best take care of a patient.
LAZOU: Yeah, it’s scary. The more I learn about how the healthcare system works in this country, the more I’m terrified of it. Because having lived in Mauritius and Canada, both having different versions of public healthcare, I just don’t understand why there is so much pushback in America for single payer system, what are the common pushbacks that you’re getting?
Do any of them actually make any sense?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: So probably the biggest one you hear is that it’s socialized medicine which it’s not. And then the second thing is that people are led to believe we have the best healthcare system full of freedom and individual rights of any place in the world. But the reality is if you get sick, you soon realize you don’t have freedom. The government is not telling you what doctor you can see, what hospital you can go to, what medication you can take. It’s insurance companies telling you, okay, we only have a contract with these few doctors, and those are the doctors you have to go to. This is the hospital you have to go to, and guess what?
You can’t take this medicine. You have to take this cheaper one because that’s the one that we’re going to only pay for. So the idea of individual freedom existing in healthcare is, just nonsense.
And then it’s a lot of ignorance and scaring. But, I have friends of mine who are Canadian and they will tell you their healthcare system’s not perfect. But I will say this, nobody in Canada ever goes bankrupt because they get sick.
And here in the us millions of people go bankrupt because they get sick. Even those that have insurance, many of them can go bankrupt. And then the other part is that. Look at the other countries that do healthcare, right?
Korea, Taiwan France they have government run healthcare systems where the patients and the citizens would not trade it for any healthcare system in the world. So a lot of that is just great marketing, scare tactics and ignorance on the part of the American consumer. But I think as people have a family member who’s harmed by the healthcare system or get sick themselves, they soon realize this healthcare system is not what they were told it was.
LAZOU: Yeah. You mentioned earlier that even some doctors were pushing back when you were starting to ask, why? Why should we settle for this system? So is there a lot of concern among doctors about what a single payer system would do to their salary?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: So that was one of the biggest myths that’s out there. If you look at the average salary of some specialists in Canada or Korea, they’re actually the same or more than what you would get in California. And on top of that, they don’t have to pay malpractice insurance or the malpractice insurance is much cheaper because one of the reasons malpractice is so expensive, if you harm a patient, then you have to figure out how to pay for that patient’s medical care for the rest of their lives. If they’re living in a country where the medical care is covered by the government, guess what? They don’t have to worry about malpractice costs.
Also the average doctor in the state of Cal or in the United States has to spend so much hiring office staff to fight with insurance companies to handle billing and all those things. Whereas in Canada and Korea, there, it’s very simple because it’s standardized. You get the same billing and it’s all electronic, so you don’t have to worry about administrative waste. You don’t have to hire all these people to fight with insurance companies all the time. It’s much simpler. I would argue not only do doctors in these countries make similar salaries, but in the end they have lower costs, so they have more take home pay. Now again, a lot of that was this feeling that they didn’t want the government coming in and telling ’em how to practice. But the more and more that physicians practice in the existing system, they realize insurance companies are constantly getting between them and their patients every day. And so I think it’s gotten to a point where a lot of doctors have burned out the overall burnout rate and satisfaction among doctors is really at a precarious rate.
And I think what I’ve seen from more and more doctors who used to call me a socialist and now are like, you know what, after practicing this many years, you’re right. I can’tcontinue in this system anymore. I wish we had a simple system with a universal payer.
LAZOU: Yeah it’s baffling just how much time and effort needs to be dedicated to just fighting the insurance companies at the doctor’s office. I know my doctor says my insurance is horrible to deal with.
Dr. Paul Y. Song: yeah. A lot of them are. And it’s gotten to a point where there are doctors now that are refusing to take insurance. I don’t necessarily agree with it because I think again, we made an oath to take care of patients regardless of insurance, but I think it’s gotten to a point where they just can’t function fighting with insurance companies all the time.
Yes indeed. We’re seeing more organizing and more kind of cross pollination among grassroots movements over the last few years, and you’ve had some experience with that. And I wonder if you wanted to share some of your work and how it has been amplified by collaborating with other movements.
Yeah. I used to run an organization called The Courage Campaign, and we were involved in tackling progressive issues here in the state of California. But what I realized is that there was such a large group of very fervent dedicated activists who never really worked with one another and communicated with one another what they were doing.
So environmental groups didn’t really talk to healthcare groups. And people that looked at children welfare didn’t necessarily talk to criminal justice reform groups. And in the end though, there is that common theme that what I’m working on could impact some of your people that you’re fighting for and vice versa.
And I think getting them all together in a room to share what they were working on, to see how there could be some combining of resources and passion to move things along. I think it was a really important thing. And I think when I look at healthcare
initially the single-payer, Medicare for All Coalition was primarily a bunch of now hippie doctors in their seventies and eighties who were predominantly, if you had to have a stereotypical type like white Berkeley educated, but really passionate, they were never really involved with immigrant rights groups. They care about immigrant rights and such, but there was never that decision to engage.
But now when you look at it when you look at all of the immigrants who were being covered by Medi-Cal, or were ineligible, if we could get them all under one umbrella. Then again, you have more of people fighting for a more just healthcare system. And same thing with unions, right?
A lot of the unions have constantly in labor negotiation strife with their employers. Imagine if we could, make it so their employers never had to give healthcare anymore, more money could be used for wages and then they wouldn’t have to worry about labor negotiation strife, at least with regard to healthcare.
Those are the types of things that I felt were really important to try to build those bridges, to cross pollinate various groups to work on various issues. And then ultimately. Even though one of the groups I’m with is a single payer organization, when there were groups that were trying to fight for access for kids healthcare or healthy kid initiatives we would sign on to some of the work that they were doing.
So those are the types of things that I think it’s really important for us not to stay siloed, but if anything, to see how we can work together and build a broader coalition.
LAZOU: That’s awesome. Now you mentioned all the strikes recently and there’s been a lot of large, massive protests for human rights in the last few years. And I think in your articles that I saw, you said that there’s been a shift in the attitude towards Medicare for all. So how feasible is it politically to talk about Medicare for all now in 2024?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: I think you have more and more candidates that are talking about it when they run, both in terms of the local level as well as the national level. I think certainly Senator Sanders did a lot to elevate that.
But the reality is, even though a majority of Americans now support Medicare for all, we have a very powerful lobby of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, hospital associations that pay a lot of money to get politicians elected, politicians that will always maintain the status quo and look out for their interests at the expense of their own constituents. That is the challenge. Until we can really fill the House and Senate with real, progressive. doesn’t even have to be progressive. I’ve heard libert, some libertarians who believe in single payer because they feel like the insurance industry has become too powerful. But as long as we have members of Congress who are beholden to corporate donors nothing will ever get done. And I think you see lots of areas where the government doesn’t listen to the will of its people. And so this is one area unfortunately that that’s the case.
And California for quote, as progressive as California claims it is, you have a large swath of our legislature that is beholden to the insurance industry here in California.
LAZOU: So as you said, most Americans support Medicare for all, including I think a hundred percent of my listeners. So if they wanted to get involved in advocating for better access to care and eventually single payer healthcare, are there any organizations that you particularly like that are organized and pushing for this?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: Yeah I think in California, there’s a healthcare for all. If they put in CalCare now there’s a dedicated group of activists and coalition builders that are doing that. Trying to work on the grassroots level there at farmer’s markets throughout California, tabling and giving out pamphlets and information on why a single payer system here in the state of California would be better for each individual. If they wanted to really learn more about healthcare policy and specifically single payer, Physicians for National Health Plan, PNHP is a great website for them to look at. There’s lots of really good policy papers and research that’s done that shows a lot of issues of our healthcare.
And I think it’s just important for them to speak comfortably about why they think our healthcare system’s broken. And for me. I was a little discouraged this past year in California. There were some competing groups that were fighting amongst each other trying to push different agendas.
One was trying to do a federal waiver. One was trying to do a full single payer bill, and they ended up really cutting each other’s legs out which kind of played into the hands of the private insurance industry. I am still optimistic that at some point, we will get somebody who will galvanize our electorate in California, maybe with the next gubernatorial election.
Somebody will run that the people can fight and organize behind.
LAZOU: Yeah. Now I believe you’re mostly doing research now, or are you still practicing medicine or are you focused on your biotech company?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: No I am not seeing patients directly anymore, but very much involved in coming up with an innovative treatment for Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, using patient’s own immune cells and really been focused on getting that through the FDA approval process and into the clinic. It’s probably been the most challenging thing I’ve ever done in my life. But also seeing actual patients show real improvement has also probably been one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever seen and done in my life. It’s really taken up almost all of my energy and attention. I still will give lectures at medical schools and things on why I think single payers still the best way to go. but particularly this last year with a lot of the infighting, I just felt like my limited bandwidth would be better spent trying to get this through the clinic and the FDA.
LAZOU: Yeah, so talk a little bit about this research on the natural killer cells. I read that the first clinical trial showed that it could actually help Alzheimer’s patients improve or stabilize, which is huge. I think no other treatment exists that can reverse Alzheimer’s, correct.
Dr. Paul Y. Song: Correct. uh,
We’ve developed a way to take patient’s own natural killer cells, which are part of the immune system. We can grow them and stimulate them and make them stronger and give them back to patients. We found that when we do that and put them back into patients, that the natural killer cells can get up into the brain and start to clear the proteins that are accumulating in Alzheimer’s disease as well as reduce some of the neuroinflammation.
And by doing that, that we’re able to have patients either remain stable or show improvement in their cognitive abilities. So right now, as you point out, all patients who have Alzheimer’s disease there is no treatment that actually stops them from getting worse. It only slows the level of their decline. So what we showed in our first sample of only 10 patients is that 90% of the patients either got better or remained stable.
It so only 10% continued to get worse. Now this, the sample was small, but again, the results that we had had never been seen before. And we submitted all that data to the US FDA, and they allowed us to move forward now with our phase two trial. The good thing about it is there’s no genetic modification to the cells and there’s no side effects associated with a treatment. So this could be a very non-toxic, safe way to treat a big problem. It’s estimated right now that worldwide there’s about 45 million people that either have some form of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. This is really an unmet need.
LAZOU: Yeah. Are you doing a big. A good trial now, phase
Dr. Paul Y. Song: Yeah, so we just enrolled the first patient in our new trial last week. And we’ll be opening up several sites throughout the United States over the next several and we hope to be able to present some really new compelling data before the end of the year.
LAZOU: That’s awesome. We actually had an episode on dementia and Alzheimer’s a couple seasons ago. I know some of our listeners have people they know who have Alzheimer’s or have a parent or somebody who has Alzheimer’s, if they’re interested in the trial, is that something that people can apply?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: Yeah it should be up on the clinicaltrials.gov website in the next 30 days. So I would ask people to look at that, but they can look at the company. Our company’s called nk, gen N-K-G-E-N, biotech, and if they go to the website, they can learn out a little bit more information on our clinical trial where they might be able to try to be enrolled.
One thing it’s important to realize is there are many stages of Alzheimer’s disease and. Up to now, the majority of treatments have focused on the earliest stage, what we call mild cognitive impairment. We’re focused more on the moderate so a little bit more advanced population. So if somebody has a family member that has that and is interested in learning more, they can go to the company website and find out where they might be able to enroll.
LAZOU: Awesome. So what does that treatment look like? So you take the immune cells from the patient themselves, and then
Dr. Paul Y. Song: Yeah, so we draw we draw blood, we isolate the natural killer cells, we grow them into large numbers of cells and then we infuse them into the patient every three weeks. Just a simple iv. And we do that every three weeks for a full year. And we measure the progress both in terms of their cognitive changes, but we do imaging and we also check the levels of inflammation and proteins in their cerebral spinal fluid. So it’s a pretty extensive follow-up for the patients. But again, there’s no side effects and it’s something that we really believe will have some unprecedented results.
LAZOU: That’s amazing. Alright, before I let you go, I usually do a rapid fire section. These are five, one word or one phrase answers. You don’t have to explain, but you can if you want to.
Dr. Paul Y. Song: Okay.
LAZOU: Alright. What’s an Asian food that you’ll never get tired of?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: Oh dumplings.
LAZOU: What’s an Asian food that you should like, but don’t.
Dr. Paul Y. Song: Really spicy Korean food,
LAZOU: What languages do you speak?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: Spanish, English, and Korean.
LAZOU: What’s an annoying stereotype or myth about being a doctor?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: That we have no personality.
LAZOU: And finally, what’s your jam? What are you listening to right now?
Dr. Paul Y. Song: Oh, I’m still old school. I like everything from the Smiths to old school hip hop Tupac and Snoop. And then I’m still a rocker at heart. Everything from Rush to Def Leppard. But I really am pretty, pretty broad in my music.
A lot of times if I’m working, I like to listen to very cool, long, Grateful Dead jams or Bon Iver so it’s it really depends on the mood.
LAZOU: Awesome. Thank you so much for doing this. Really appreciate you taking the time.
Dr. Paul Y. Song: Thanks for having me. and I appreciate you getting the word out for our community.
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