Mindera Health, the maker of the Mind.Px dermal biomarker patch (DBP), has announced the initiation of a pilot program in California and Texas to assess the test’s ability to affect patient outcomes, drug switching, and overall net savings versus a control group, as well as to develop a better understanding of physician utilization.
“Utilizing a pilot to validate our predicted costs saving while improving patient outcomes is the first of many steps in the accelerating national coverage of Mind.Px” said George Mahaffey, president and CEO of Mindera Health in a press release.
The Mind.Px is a painless DBP targeted for use in patients with moderate to severe psoriasis to help determine the most precise and effective treatment for each patient. Available psoriasis treatments vary widely and aim to stop skin cells from growing too quickly and to remove scales. Treatment options include creams and ointments, light therapy, and oral or injected medications.
Psoriasis is a chronic autoimmune skin disorder that affects over 7.5 million patients in the United States and about 125 million people worldwide. Currently, however, psoriasis treatment selection is often a case of trial and error and moderate to severe psoriasis is often treated with systemic or expensive biologic drugs. However, many patients do not initially respond to the first biologic started (primary failure) and initial responders may develop decreasing efficacy over time (secondary failure). This results in discontinuing treatment and forces biologic switching.
According to Mindera, the company’s test has the potential to save as much as $15,000 per patient, by providing a precision approach to therapy selection and thus avoid the iterative approach to finding the right treatment for each patient. When considered collectively, this could potentially save smaller health plans millions of dollars annually, to hundreds of millions of dollar for large group plans.
“Mind.Px is meant to reduce the trial-and-error process of prescribing biologics and help pharmacy benefit managers and insurance providers cut down on excessive spending while improving patient outcomes,” noted Ann Deren-Lewis, chief commercial officer for Mindera.
Mind.Px is the flagship test of Mindera Health, designed to prospectively predict a patient’s response to expensive biologic drug classes prior to therapeutic selection and treatment. The technology predicts (91% PPV) the appropriate biologic drug class for an individual patient prior to treatment.
According to the company website: “The Mindera Health platform provides the missing predictive link between a patient’s genetic markers and responsiveness to different drug classes. By capturing RNA from a patient’s psoriasis lesion, Next Generation Sequencing is used to evaluate over 7,000 biomarkers per test sample. Analyses of these biomarkers can be used by patients, providers and payers to predict biologic drug response to better select the ideal therapy.”
