Proove is fundamentally improving pain management by giving physicians the information they need to provide better and more cost-effective care. Brian Meshkin, CEO and Founder of Proove Biosciences
(PRWEB) April 07, 2015
Proove Biosciences a commercial and research leader in Personalized Medicine, is excited to announce the launch of Proove Opioid Response - the world’s first clinical laboratory test to predict responders to opioid pain medications. Building on its proprietary tests to identify patients at risk for opioid misuse and pain perception, Proove Opioid Response joins a menu of tests that provide proof to improve healthcare decisions involving pain management.
Rather than the standard “let’s try this out and see if it works” approach to therapeutic selection, Proove Opioid Response gives physicians information about which opioids a patient is likely to respond to versus not likely to respond to - without exposing the patient to a medication and without the cost of the prescription. Proove Opioid Response assesses 49 genetic variations to give physicians information about the safety and effectiveness of five specific opioids: hydrocodone, oxycodone, morphine, tramadol, and hydromorphone.
Proove Opioid Response improves clinical outcomes because patients are only prescribed medications that are likely to work, and it improves economic outcomes by avoiding expensive treatment failures and adverse drug events. Unlike drug metabolism genetic testing offered by hundreds of labs, Proove continues to offer proprietary testing, supported by data, and linked to outcomes.
“When patients are given an opioid for pain relief, there is a continuum of responses to the medication,” Dr. Svetlana Kantorovich, Director of Scientific and Clinical Affairs at Proove, states. “These tests provide information for enhancing efficacy and decreasing toxicity of a patient’s opioid therapy by analyzing the genetics underlying the target of drug action, modulation, and metabolism. All of these factors are important in determining the effect that a drug is likely to have on a patient. For the first time, these variables have been researched and curated into one test report to improve patient outcomes, decrease the use of suboptimal medications, and shorten the duration of therapy.”
Proove research studies have found that genetic polymorphisms in an enzyme known as Catechol-O-Methyltransferase, which breaks down adrenaline, noradrenaline, and dopamine, are associated with variable responses to several opioids, including Hydromorphone, Tramadol, and Oxycodone. Genetic variants of the target for opioids, the mu opioid receptor, are also associated with a poor response to the medications Morphine and Hydrocodone. Other neurotransmitter targets were further found to be relevant to response to specific opioids, such as the receptor for serotonin and the receptor for GABA, the chief inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. Each medication was analyzed individually across hundreds of patients, taking into account dozens of genetic variants, to address the considerable individual variability of response that is noted by patients and clinicians in over clinical sites nationwide.
Proove Founder and CEO Brian Meshkin explains, “Proove is fundamentally improving pain management by giving physicians the information they need to provide better and more cost-effective care. With the epidemic of opioid misuse, many foolishly say that opioids are bad drugs or should be restricted. Such generalizations are irrational. By virtue of these “one-size-fits-all” generalizations, many patients are over-prescribed medications which have led to a leading cause of death. And many patients are denied care because of a belief that an innate object like a pill can be ‘bad’. Proove provides the ability to predict efficacy and toxicity, without the health and financial risks of current approaches of trial and error.”
About Proove Biosciences
Our Mission is to Change the Future of Medicine. Proove is the proof to improve healthcare decisions. We seek to realize a future when clinicians look back and wonder how they could’ve ever prescribed medications without knowing how a patient would respond. With offices in Southern California and the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area, the Company is the research leader investigating and publishing data on the genetics of personalized pain medicine with clinical research sites across the United States. Physicians use Proove Biosciences testing to improve outcomes – both safety and efficacy of medical treatment. From a simple cheek swab collected in the office, Proove performs proprietary genetic tests in its CLIA-certified laboratory to identify patients at risk for misuse of prescription pain medications and evaluate their metabolism of medications. For more information, please visit http://www.proove.com or call toll free 855-PROOVE-BIO (855-776-6832).