WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--With rising drug prices and low patient response rates, Scipher Medicine is bringing precision medicine to autoimmune diseases by ensuring patients are prescribed optimal treatment from day one while avoiding side effects and the billions of dollars that payers and patients waste each year on ineffective treatments.
Today, Scipher announces positive outcomes of its retrospective trial for Prism, demonstrating the proprietary blood test accurately predicts non-response to anti-tumor necrosis factor (anti-TNF) therapies, including Humira®, Enbrel® and Remicade®. Anti-TNF therapy is the largest selling drug class in the world, yet a majority of patients prescribed such therapy does not reach treatment targets. Prism helps patients who will not respond to anti-TNF therapy gain access to alternative effective drugs.
Inadequate response to therapies causes significant clinical and financial burdens on the healthcare industry. Over 65% of patients prescribed anti-TNF therapy do not respond adequately to treatment resulting in disease progression and exposure to potentially dangerous and unnecessary side effects, while payers and patients spend $20 billion annually on such ineffective drugs.
By leveraging artificial intelligence and a proprietary map of all protein interactions in human cells, Scipher Medicine’s platform analyzes RNA data from a patient’s blood sample to determine the underlying molecular processes driving the disease, generating a patient’s specific disease signature. Drugs are then screened to determine which therapy targets the disease signature in order to determine most effective therapy. Prism is disease agnostic and can be applied to different disease states for a variety of clinical applications. Beyond autoimmune diseases, Scipher Medicine has also begun investigating the utility of Prism in cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurological diseases.
“The payer, provider and physician communities unanimously identified the lack of response to anti-TNF therapy in rheumatoid arthritis as one of the most pressing financial and clinical needs in healthcare today. It was based on this clear market requirement that we decided to launch Prism in this indication first,” explained Alif Saleh, CEO of Scipher Medicine. “We are excited to reveal this key medical milestone in greater detail at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference this week. The positive data supports further development of Prism”
On the heels of the positive data from the retrospective trial for Prism, Scipher will launch a prospective interventional randomized trial in 2019 in the United States to validate the clinical utility in rheumatoid arthritis. This will be the first prospective clinical trial to determine response to a therapeutic class not being sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, a significant advancement for the field of precision medicine.
About Scipher Medicine
Scipher Medicine holds a fundamental
conviction that patients deserve a simple answer to their treatment
options using scientifically-backed data. Its molecular technology
platform interprets patient RNA data using artificial intelligence and a
propriety map of all protein interactions in human cells to predict
accurately whether a patient will respond to a particular therapy. For
patients who do not respond to existing drugs, the platform identifies
new targets that can be used to develop more effective therapies. The
company’s cofounders include Dr. Joseph Loscalzo, Hersey Professor of
the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chairman
of the Department of Medicine, and Physician-in-Chief at Brigham and
Women’s Hospital and Dr. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Robert Gray Dodge
Professor of Network Science and a Distinguished University Professor at
Northeastern University. Scipher Medicine is a privately held company
headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. To learn more, visit www.sciphermedicine.com.
