Predicting and Measuring Medication Effectiveness to Improve Patient Outcomes

SUBMITTED BY RACHEL KINGSLEY, OPERATIONS SPECIALIST, PHENOMICS HEALTH

Phenomics Health Inc. is a precision health company based in Plymouth, MI that aims to lead the wave of precision prescribing and monitoring patient treatment outcomes.

Phenomics Health is the only company worldwide that offers both pharmacogenomic (PGx) and pharmacometabolomic (PMx) testing for a wide variety of healthcare settings, including clinical practice and research, to improve patient care and encourage clinical studies in the field. As a precision health company, Phenomics combines the value of PGx testing with comprehensive PMx testing to provide another dimension for precision medicine.

The growth of PGx shows that medication therapy cannot use a one-size-fits-all approach. Each person and their unique genomic profile require prescribing based on the individual needs of the patient’s genetics. When patients have comorbid medical conditions, their medication lists can grow to considerable lengths, resulting in polypharmacy and a host of adverse effects from drugdrug interactions (DDIs). While those lists may show the possible medications the patients are currently taking, it will not tell the story of how they got there and all the failed medications to reach their best treatment. The implementation of PMx and PGx together can shorten the path each patient will require to find their optimal therapies and alleviate the burdens that can accumulate along the way.

Phenomics Health PrecisMed® PMx products are the sole technology available to detect and measure over 200 commonly used drugs in a patient’s circulation. This can be done with a serum sample collected by venipuncture, or a plasma sample collected with a fingerstick and a few drops of blood. The patient sample results in a report from one of four different PrecisMed tests, each focusing on a certain specialty such as neuropsychiatry, pain, or polypharmacy. This allows providers and researchers to quantify the drugs in their patients and assess their drugs’ pharmacokinetic properties are being affected. While this can be done for various individual analytes, PrecisMed offers this information for a wider net of targets together.

The PredictScript™ products offer comprehensive PGx information to interested providers and their patients. It integrates guidelines from organizations like the FDA and CPIC along with independent Phenomics research to provide one of the most comprehensive PGx tests on the market. PredictScript Poly covers up to 140 drugs across the therapeutic areas of neuropsychiatry, pain, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and diabetes. The prediction provided by the tests offers a chance to avoid the trial-and-error burden that can be involved in drug therapy. Rather than start a new drug and wait days to weeks to observe its safety and efficacy in the patient, providers can eliminate some inappropriate choices and narrow down the selection among better options.

Both PMx and PGx technology has been used separately in for both clinical and research applications, but Phenomics has brought the two innovations together into six commercial products. Expanding and combining the two technologies has allowed Phenomics to make precision medicine more precise by enabling the potential to both predict and measure the drug therapy.

These tools can reduce healthcare costs, adverse drug reactions, and many more issues plaguing the healthcare system. The goal is to empower providers to make stronger informed decisions for the benefit of their patients.

PHENOMICSHEALTH.COM