Cathy Cather, a former senior vice chairman at HealthAllies, was consulting with healthcare startups when a sequence of occasions modified her life. After a surgical procedure, her husband was rushed to the ICU for an adversarial drug response.
Six months later, her mom was hospitalized from an adversarial drug response, and an in depth good friend died from a drugs they have been taking.
“When that occurred for the third time, I went wait a minute, is it simply that I seen it and different folks don’t?” Cather mentioned in a cellphone interview. “It seems that it occurs 2.7 million occasions a 12 months that anyone notices.”
She received a pharmacogenetic take a look at for her husband and spent hours poring over the 36-page report. She ordered the same take a look at for her mother, and discovered she by no means ought to have been on the remedy she was taking.
“I believed, that is life-changing,” she mentioned.
Based mostly on that have, she began Parallel Profile, a startup to make it simpler to examine for adversarial drug reactions and interpret testing outcomes. Final week, a panel of judges chosen the Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based startup on the winner of the well being IT observe for MedCity INVEST’s Pitch Good contest.
Although adversarial drug reactions are uncommon, research estimate that roughly 7% of hospitalized sufferers expertise one. Pharmacogenetic testing is seldom utilized in medical apply, partly due to challenges in ordering checks and deciphering outcomes.
Parallel Profile screens customers for greater than 1,000 generally prescribed medicines the place a genetic variant may affect their care. The concept is to examine for 3 potential points: whether or not a drug can be poisonous to that particular person, whether or not a unique dose can be wanted, or whether or not a drug merely gained’t work for them.
To find out whether or not folks have a genetic threat issue for an adversarial drug response, the startup makes use of public knowledge from the Scientific Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC). After ordering the take a look at and consulting with a doctor, customers mail in a cheek swab, which is shipped to one of many laboratories with which Parallel Profile companions.
As soon as they know their genetic variants, Parallel Profile builds a abstract of these outcomes that’s simple to grasp. For instance, it exhibits what model identify medication are tied to every chemical identify. It might additionally pull in data on what medicines customers are presently taking to flag potential drug interactions. Customers can replace this abstract over time with new prescriptions or diagnoses which may have an effect on their care.
The system is presently being evaluated for pilots by 4 giant corporations which can be a part of the Employer Well being Innovation Roundtable. Employers will cowl the take a look at for individuals who face an elevated threat of an adversarial response, comparable to people who find themselves taking greater than 4 medicines, or who’re taking high-risk medicines, comparable to anticoagulants. Then, testing is taken into account for people who find themselves taking medication with excessive failure charges, comparable to chemotherapy, behavioral well being medicines, or costly specialty medicines.
Parallel Profile expenses $599 per panel, although the worth can differ relying on the dimensions of the employer. It expects to succeed in profitability in its first working 12 months.
Siddharth Sridhar, a company growth affiliate with Centene and one of many judges at MedCity INVEST, mentioned Parallel Profile was chosen because the winner of the pitch competitors as a result of the corporate had a traction with a robust core group of shoppers and was money stream optimistic.
For Cather, the objective is to forestall future adversarial drug reactions, and assist folks decide if any of the medication they’re taking aren’t working.
“We save lives, we cut back hurt. A number of issues that occur with these adversarial reactions, is even when they survive, there’s this lifelong harm,” Cather mentioned. “That’s what we do: making life-saving science accessible.”