Assurex Health announces release of new psychiatric pharmacogenomic test panel

Jul 15 2013

Assurex Health today announced the release of GeneSight Psychotropic 2.0, its lead psychiatric pharmacogenomic test panel. This latest GeneSight Psychotropic version has been updated to include four additional medications that now cover a total of 36 of the most commonly prescribed psychotropic medications in the US. The added antidepressant and antipsychotic medications include Viibryd® (vilazodone), Latuda® (lurasidone), Saphris® (asenapine), and Invega® (paliperidone).  Additionally, the GeneSight Psychotropic 2.0 report includes information for 17 psychotropic medications that have pharmacogenomic information in their FDA approved labels.

"Assurex Health is committed to bringing the latest clinical and scientific findings to support clinicians and their patients in selecting medications to treat neuropsychiatric disorders," according to Bryan M. Dechairo, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Medical Affairs & Clinical Development at Assurex Health. "GeneSight Psychotropic 2.0 now includes recently approved FDA medications, a new gene polymorphism, and easy-to-understand information to help categorize individual psychotropic medications."

GeneSight is a unique pharmacogenomic treatment decision support product that tests for clinically important genetic variants affecting a patient's response to psychiatric medications.  GeneSight provides information that helps clinicians make informed, evidence-based decisions about proper drug selection, delivered in a simple and easily understood report. Prescribing a medication regimen that is more likely to succeed because it is tailored to an individual patient's genetic profile can help the clinician better manage the patient's disease and improve patient outcomes.

A Mayo Clinic prospective clinical study published recently in Translational Psychiatry (Oct. 2012) compared GeneSight-guided prescribing versus treatment-as-usual prescribing in adult patients with a primary diagnosis of a major depressive disorder over an 8 week period.  The study found up to a 4-fold increase in symptom improvement for GeneSight-guided patients. An Assurex Health sponsored one-year blinded retrospective study of adult patients with a diagnosis of depressive or anxiety disorder, also published recently in Translational Psychiatry (Mar. 2013), demonstrated that patients taking genetically inappropriate or "red bin" medications based on the GeneSight report had substantially higher rates of medical utilization, 3-fold greater medical absence days, and 4-fold greater medical disability claims than study patients on non-red bin medications.

SOURCE Assurex Health