A panel of distinguished physicians experienced in early sequential multi-drug therapy for COVID-19 presented a continuing medical education event for physicians in Maui on Saturday, January 29:
Ryan Cole, MD, CEO and Medical Director of Cole Diagnostics, serves clinicians throughout Idaho and the nation with expert pathology diagnoses and patient-centered care. Dr. Cole completed his residency in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology at the Mayo Clinic, where he was chief fellow during his surgical pathology fellowship, followed by a year as chief fellow at the Ackerman Academy of Dermatopathology in New York City, under the direction of world renowned dermatopathologist, the late A. Bernard Ackerman. Dr. Cole’s philosophy is that the patient comes first in every diagnosis, and that the clinician needs definitive answers in order to best treat their patients.
Having seen over half a million pathology cases in his practice, Dr. Cole is uniquely suited to provide answers quickly and accurately. He is licensed in 12 states and serves patients from Maine to California. Cole Diagnostics, one of the largest independent laboratories in Idaho, was founded in 2004 and has grown from a boutique dermatopathology practice to a full service Anatomic and Clinical pathology laboratory with an extensive menu of testing capabilities, including molecular testing, microbiology, clinical laboratory blood testing, and cytology, in addition to outpatient surgical biopsies. He has helped perform and diagnose over 100,000 Covid tests this past year.
Richard Urso, MD, graduated AOA with highest Honors from the University of Texas School of Medicine. He continued with 5 years of postgraduate training and research and is the sole inventor of an FDA-approved wound healing drug. He’s gone on to repurpose many other medications for usage in scarring, wound healing, inflammation, and viral infection. He’s the former Chief of Orbital Oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He’s been involved in Covid-19 since March 2020 discussing pandemic response and he has treated over 1100 Covid patients. He’s met with representatives in the White House, in Congress and the Senate, and worked with members of the FDA, the CDC and the NIH. He’s been actively involved in his state, with both the Governor’s office and the Texas Senate.
Pierre Kory, MD, MPA, is the former Chief of the Critical Care Service and Medical Director of the Trauma and Life Support Center at the University of Wisconsin. He is a Board-Certified Specialist in Critical Care Medicine, Pulmonary Diseases, and Internal Medicine. He is most known in his specialty as an one of the international pioneers in the development and teaching of Critical Care Ultrasonography. He is the senior editor of the most popular and award-winning textbook in that field and the 2nd edition of his book has now been published in 7 languages.
Dr. Kory has also been nationally recognized as a pioneer in the research and application of; 1) the use of therapeutic hypothermia after cardiac arrest and 2) the efficacy of intravenous ascorbic acid in the treatment of severe infections and septic shock. He is also well known as a master educator, having accumulated multiple teaching awards throughout his career at both the Departmental and Divisional levels among the multiple institutions where he has served as faculty.
During the COVID-19 epidemic, Dr. Kory left Wisconsin to lead an ICU in his hometown of New York City during their initial catastrophic surge in the US, and then later he led ICU’s in multiple massive outbreak areas such as Greenville, SC and Milwaukee, WI. Most importantly, from the first onset of COVID-19, under the leadership of his close colleague Professor Paul Marik, Dr. Kory helped form and became the President of a non-profit organization made up of an internationally renowned workgroup of critical care experts called the Front-Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance.
Dr. Kory spoke at a Senate Homeland Security Committee meeting on December 8, 2020. In that testimony, he led a call to action of the US national health care agencies to investigate and adopt ivermectin as a solution to the current crisis of the pandemic by its ability to stop transmission, hospitalizations, and death in COVID-19. His testimony and his organization’s I-MASK+ treatment protocol for the prophylaxis and early treatment of COVID-19 has now gone viral in many countries around the world, with one website video in the US now having been viewed 6 million times.
Robert W. Malone MD, MS, is a US-based physician-scientist who operates a consultant practice specializing in advanced development of medical countermeasures for infectious diseases (vaccines and drugs). He has served as an Assistant and Associate Professor of Pathology and Surgery at UC Davis, University of Maryland, and the Armed Forces University of the Health Sciences. Core competencies include clinical development, regulatory affairs, project management, and contract development. His medical degree is from the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. He completed the Harvard Medical School fellowship as a Global Clinical Research Scholar in 2016, and was scientifically trained at UC Davis, UC San Diego, and at the Salk Institute Molecular Biology and Virology laboratories. Dr. Malone is an internationally recognized scientist (virology, immunology, molecular biology) and the original inventor of mRNA Vaccination, DNA Vaccination, and multiple non-viral DNA and RNA/mRNA delivery technologies. Dr. Malone holds numerous fundamental domestic and foreign patents in the fields of gene delivery, delivery formulations, and vaccines: including for fundamental DNA and RNA/mRNA vaccine technologies. He has approximately 100 peer-reviewed publications and published abstracts and about 12,000 citations of his peer reviewed publications (per Google Scholar with an “outstanding” impact factor rating). He has been an invited speaker at over 50 conferences, has chaired numerous conferences and he has sat on or served as chairperson on numerous NIAID and DoD study sections.
Dr. Malone has a history of assembling and managing expert teams that focus on solving complicated biodefense challenges to meet US Government requirements. He was instrumental in enabling the PHAC/rVSV ZEBOV (“Merck Ebola”) vaccine to move forward quickly towards BLA and (now recently granted) licensure. Dr. Malone got the project on track in support of DoD/DTRA and NewLink Genetics, recruited organizations to team with USAMRIID/WRAIR to develop the immunoassays, put WHO and Norwegian government philanthropic leadership in touch with Pentagon leadership to expedite the initial WRAIR clinical and ring vaccination trials, recruited a management team, recruited Merck vaccines to purchase the product candidate from NewLink, helped write and edit the clinical trials developed by the World Health Organization and lead the development of the BARDA and DTRA contracts – yielding over 200M$ in resources. Dr. Malone’s early involvement in this project allowed for the Merck Ebola vaccine to be developed very rapidly.
Currently, Dr. Malone has been leading a large team since January 10, 2020 focused on clinical research design, drug development, computational discovery and mechanisms of action for COVID-19 repurposed drug treatments. This work has included multiple manuscripts summarizing team findings relating to famotidine, mast cells, and the mechanism of COVID-19 disease. Manuscripts in review focus on clinical effects of celecoxib, famotidine, and dexamethasone in COVID-19. He developed and wrote the initial clinical trial design: A Single Center, Randomized, Double Blinded Controlled Crossover Observational Outpatient Trial of the Safety and Efficacy of Oral Famotidine for the Treatment of COVID-19 in Non-Hospitalized Symptomatic Adults. Another project he has supporting is development and performance of a virtual COVID-19 outpatient clinical trial employing novel on-line patient centered outcomes research capabilities. He has participated on the NIH/FNIH ACTIV review panel for the last year and has also helped open an IND for famotidine use for treatment and prevention of COVID19 disease, an IND and protocols for clinical testing of famotidine + celecoxib for treatment of COVID-19 and has enabled teaming/pharmaceutical supply arrangements with two major pharmaceutical firms. His contract development and management efforts have resulted in over 130M$ US in federal research contract funding during the last year to support this work.
Kirk Milhoan, MD, PhD, FAAP, FACC, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Biology and Chemistry from Point Loma Nazarene University. He received his PhD from UCSD in Cardiovascular Physiology and Pharmacology, focusing on cellular mechanisms of cardiac inflammation, specifically the role of platelet activating factor in activating the myocardial inflammation process. He then received his medical degree, Magna Cum Laude, from the Jefferson Medical College of the Thomas Jefferson University. He was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society as a third-year medical student. He completed his pediatric residency at David Grant Medical Center at Travis Air Force Base and pediatric cardiology fellowship at San Diego Children’s Hospital/UCSD. He is a Diplomate of the American Board of Pediatrics in Pediatrics and Pediatric Cardiology, and a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology and American Academy of Pediatrics. He served thirteen years in the United States Air Force as a pediatric cardiologist and flight surgeon and served two tours in Iraq. He is the medical director and co-founder, with his wife Kimberly D. Milhoan, MD, FASA of For Hearts and Souls, a non-profit organization specializing in the international care of children with congenital heart disease. As the medical director and diagnostic cardiologist for the organization, he has voluntarily served the needs of tens of thousands of children with heart defects in Bolivia, Honduras, Mongolia, Mexico, Kurdistan, Iraq, Israel, Sudan, Uzbekistan, Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea, Kosovo, Tibet and Nepal. The organization has performed over 700 invasive pediatric cardiac procedures internationally. Kirk is also the Senior Pastor of Calvary Chapel South Maui. He and his wife have treated many patients with COVID-19 through their federally recognized free mobile medical clinic in Maui.
Sabine Hazan, MD, is the Founder and CEO of Progenabiome. As a specialist in gastroenterology, internal medicine, and hepatology, Dr. Hazan has used her expertise in many regards over the last two decades. Dr. Hazan is also the Founder & CEO of the Malibu Specialty Center and Ventura Clinical Trials, where she conducts and oversees clinical trials for cutting-edge research on various medical issues. Dr. Hazan is a top clinical investigator for multiple pharmaceutical companies, and also acts as the series editor of Practical Gastroenterology on the microbiome, a peer review journal that reaches 18,000 gastroenterologists. She was and is a speaker for World Congress of Digestive Disease, MAGI, Microbiome Congress, International Drug Discovery Science and Technology Conference and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology).
Kimberly Milhoan, MD, FASA, Executive Director of Global Covid Summit Maui, is a graduate of Stanford University, with a B.A. in Human Biology, with a concentration in Public Health and Health Administration. She worked as a health care management consultant for American Practice Management before obtaining her medical degree from the University of California Davis School of Medicine, where she was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. She completed her anesthesiology residency, as chief resident, at the University of Health Science Center in San Antonio. She was an assistant professor and then assistant clinical professor at UTHSCSA, specializing in pediatric cardiac anesthesia, until her move to Maui, and has since continued regular locums tenems care in pediatric anesthesiology at mainland children’s hospitals. She is a Diplomate of the American Board of Anesthesiology in Anesthesiology and Pediatric Anesthesiology, and a Fellow of the American Society of Anesthesiology. She is the president and co-founder, with her husband Kirk Milhoan, MD, PhD, FAAP, FACC, of For Hearts and Souls, a non-profit specializing in the international care of children with congenital heart disease. She is a graduate of the World Journalism Institute. She is a shareholder in Interisland Medical Group on Maui. She and her husband Kirk, who is also the Senior Pastor of Calvary Chapel South Maui, have treated many patients with COVID-19 through their federally recognized free mobile medical clinic.