What if doctors could look at your genetic makeup and offer you a tailor-made treatment plan? Drugs personalized for your unique, individual brain.
That’s the wave of the future. We’re not quite there yet, but one company is using a technology that rules out different drugs that will not work.
Licensed from the Mayo Clinic and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Assurex’s GeneSight Psychotropic technology evaluates how an individual’s genes might respond to certain pharmaceuticals used to treat bipolar disorder, depression, PTSD, anxiety, schizophrenia, and other behavioral health diagnoses. The test is available now in some states and has been licensed for use in VA hospitals.
“Trying to find the right medication is like trying to find a needle in the haystack,” said Bryan Dechairo, senior vice president of Assurex’s medical affairs and clinical development. “What GeneSight does is it removes a lot of the hay.”
Indeed, the road to the right treatment plan is a rocky one, to say the least. I tried ten different psychotropic drugs in different combinations and dosages until I found the right cocktail. It took more than a year.
With GeneSight, doctors use a cotton swab to absorb DNA from the inside of your cheek. Then they test it to determine which meds do not interfere with your gene profile. They also determine which meds are antithetical with your genetic makeup or basically, meds that won’t work on you.
Assurex offers no guarantees the process will work but says that it is clinically proven to double the chances that it will.
If you’re reading this blog, you probably know the drill: A psychiatrist prescribes you an antidepressant and it’s wait-and-see for 4-6 weeks. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. But if it doesn’t, it’s back to square one.
“[People can] start really just downward spiraling and feeling even worse and worse depressed. There’s a risk of suicide,” Dechairo said. “Our test would have predicted that those patients would have been the worst patients, and of course, those patients over the course of one year had those problems because they were on medication the doctor prescribed them that was simply not right for them.”
More than 130,000 people have used the test since its inception.
“This [test] is huge because we know, for instance, in the field of depression that the failure rate on antidepressants is very high,” said Kathleen Chard, director of the trauma recovery center at the Cincinnati VA and a psychologist at University of Cincinnati Medical Center. “Once you fail on one antidepressant, the likelihood of failing on a second is even higher. It’s something that we’ve struggled with when you have to take multiple medication changes to get something right.”
But when you get it right, it’s night and day. I’ve been stable since 2008, when I finally tried lithium in addition to Prozac and some other meds, which helped me feel like a normal human being again. I wish this test had been around when I was on the hunt for the right cocktail. It would’ve made life so much more livable.
