In House Warrior

Cures For Many Rare Diseases May Already Exist: In a “call for the courageous” Annette Bakker, a PhD in Biochemistry and President of the Children’s Tumor Foundation, speaks with host Richard Levick of LEVICK about the fact that cures for cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, neurofibromatosis and rare cancers may have already been developed but that scientists don’t realize it yet. With minor tweaks, some of pharma's discarded drugs could be turned into game-changing therapies for currently untreatable diseases. Big Pharma will need big business incentives -- whether that’s the promise of higher ESG scores, new investors or a stake in the repurposed drugs -- to agree so CTF developed the BRIDGE initiative to helps find just such incentives. CTF has built worldwide collaborative science networks, an open biobank, a centralized data collection and integration platform, a patient registry and more to make it easier and more economically viable for pharmaceutical companies to recycle old drugs to save lives. CTF has already successfully worked with one major drug company to repurpose a discontinued medicine that may end up helping treat a number of rare tumors.

The Stolen Heart: Chip Jones, author of The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South and winner of the 2021 Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction, speaks with host Richard Levick of LEVICK about this tragic true story. In 1968, in Richmond, Virginia, Bruce Tucker, a middle aged African American family man, had his heart and kidney harvested after an accident, without consent or even notification to his family and before he was clinically dead. To this day, there has been no compensation paid to the family. Virginia Commonwealth University, who’s predecessor teaching hospital was the site of this medical atrocity, still struggles over half a century later with how to deal with this properly. A society which turned a blind eye to teaching hospitals regularly robbing the graves of African Americans and treating the sacred as so much commerce, struggles with this legacy to this day. Chip has been reporting for nearly thirty years for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Roanoke Times and other publications. As a reporter for The Roanoke Times , he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the Pittston coal strike. He is the former communications director of the Richmond Academy of Medicine, where he first discovered the story behind The Organ Thieves.

Getting ESG Right and Why So Many Are Getting It Wrong: Andrew Gratz, Associate General Counsel at LyondellBasell, speaks with host Richard Levick of LEVICK about what in house counsel want, particularly on ESG, and why so many get ESG wrong. He also discusses coming out of Covid and how law firms need to rethink their practice areas so they meet the needs of their clients, not the other way around.

A Solution to Wire Fraud: Serial tech entrepreneur and CEO Brian Twibell and Tony Chung, Chief Revenue Officer of WireSecure, join host Richard Levick of LEVICK to discuss the rapidly growing problem of wire fraud and phishing scams within private capital markets and M&A. The company creates secure communities and ensures each participant or business identity's financial information is verified and protected. E-mail was never designed for secure transactions and yet we often rely upon it for our most valuable business and personal transactions.

The Influencers – The Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement: Mike Ehrenstein, a partner with Ehrenstein Sager and NJ Ayuk of NJ Ayuk in Johannesburg, joins Richard Levick of LEVICK and Julian Pecquet, editor and publisher of Foreign Lobby Report, to discuss the proposed Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement, which would stitch together 54 countries into an enormous single market. If successful, the AfCFTA would increase intra-Africa trade, attract further investment and improve economies and conditions for African people.