Entrepreneur and CEO Christina DiArcangelo is putting patients first in her work – championing patient care and providing best-in-class patient advocacy services.
Christina DiArcangelo’s journey into cannabis began after she was already working in the pharmaceutical industry. Having more than two decades of experience in the biotechnology, nutraceutical, and medical device industries, DiArcangelo entered into medical cannabis following a personal experience with a loved one.
As an expert in biotechnology, DiArcangelo has now worked with a number of CBD companies and is CEO at Affinity Biopartners which conducts groundbreaking medical cannabis and cannabinoid clinical research, as well as at Affinity Patient Advocacy which assists cannabis patients with their medical cannabis journey and with legal cannabis patient advisory. Other roles include CEO at Spectral Analytics Precision Tele-Monitoring, and CEO and co-founder of AI Health Outcomes, where she has been involved with revolutionary projects and global clinical studies that positively impact patients.
“I have worked on 25 FDA-approved drugs in my career, and I have been in the cannabis and CBD clinical research space globally for the past five years,” says DiArcangelo. “I’ve worked for some very large pharmaceuticals in the space, as well as small companies that want to pursue clinical studies, whether it is a CBD company or biotech. I have helped some CBD companies who received warning letters from the FDA, because I have been in biotech for so long I understand regulations. I am proud to say an excellent relationship with the FDA, both on the traditional side as well as the medical cannabis and CBD space.”
DiArcangelo, a practising Baha’i, created Affinity Biopartners – her second clinical research organisation – which is now coming up to its six-year anniversary. Alongside its medical cannabis research, the company facilitates the development of drugs, biologics, nutraceuticals and medical devices.
“Affinity Patient Advocacy was started as a result of my father’s passing from stage four liver, lung and stomach cancers. In 2015, we did not have a medical programme in the state of Pennsylvania so I could not use medical cannabis legally to help treat my father while he was dying. So, that was interesting being his advocate, I swung in to help him because I have worked on a lot of different oncology indications throughout my career and I watched him battle cancer for relatively 22 years of his life, which was half of my life.
“So, as a result of helping him and then truly seeing with my own two eyes that there was a need for advocacy – that patients deserve a voice – and, what I love to do is design clinical studies that help patients, Affinity Patient Advocacy was started.
“This was me being able to give back to him, and carry forward his legacy because he always gave back from a labour perspective and a healthcare standpoint as he was very active as a union member. He was constantly working for people, whether it was grievance filings, trying to make sure people kept their jobs when they were unjustly accused of things. Making sure he protected his member’s rights was his number one priority, but then also ensuring that they had proper healthcare. So, you can see my foundation of where I have come from as a child growing up, and my career – serving people was very much at the forefront of my childhood into my adulthood. So for me, it was just turning the hat, not so much from a labour perspective, because I don’t work in that space, but I work with patients advocating for them, trying to help patients feel better.”
In 2018 DiArcangelo started an AI firm, developing a toolbox of two bots that sit on Alexa and Google that can be voice-activated and utilised for clinical research purposes.
“That means we can remind people to take the drug, we can ask them questions about how they are feeling and then we can collect electronic patient-reported outcomes. So, my clinical research background and all the years that I’ve been doing this have really pushed me into the tech space so that I could help my team develop an electronic data capture system.
“I also worked on building out a telemonitoring platform – I had already had the tech side. Spectral Analytics is a holding company, and underneath we have a commercial company called Avum RX. Avum RX is the CBD line and Avum is the non-CBD.
“The spectral analytics precision telemonitoring is what we open to do perpetual clinical research for CBD and medical cannabis patients. So, I took my tech and put it over there – why reinvent the wheel when it is working. I know how to work with central labs because of my biotech experience so that I can test patients looking at kidney and liver toxicity from a safety perspective, so I can drop down listings, and share them with the FDA, so that we are answering their requests, which is what they’ve requested in the entire industry. The FDA considers this a biologic, even though it is a plant that’s what they consider it – the only drug they have approved is Epidiolex which is synthetic.
“So, Spectral is gathering data to do perpetual clinical research and put patients’ care back into their hands. Doctors have access to the portal and we were doing gut microbiome analysis and we do cannabinoid testing to see what patients are deficient in – nobody is doing that yet. We do not know what we are deficient in, so, as somebody who is also formulating transdermal patches for Avon, how can I formulate for people if I don’t know what’s wrong with them?
“We are trying to work in the UK with our products because we have safe products, they are backed by science. I’m at the helm, formulating now with my scientific team and we have now formulated an immune boost patch. That is for autoimmune patients because I’m a patient, I have two autoimmune disorders and I wasn’t diagnosed until 18.
“The immune boost was not only developed for autoimmune people, but also palliative support for cancer, and then COVID. The patch has a lot of terpenes in it because, in my opinion, the terpenes are the healing components.”
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