Personalized medicine is here. But it’s up to insurance carriers to catch up with technology that’s hurtling forward faster and faster, or so says Manuel Glynias, CEO of Cleveland-based GenomOncology,
His company is in the business of solving how doctors can use genomic data to treat cancer, the first major frontier in the application of personalized medicine. It’s difficult to parse the colossal amounts of data generated from next-gen sequencing – so GenomOncology churns out simple clinical reports to make diagnosis and treatment simpler for physicians.
The company offers a low up-front fee to clients, and takes a portion of the reimbursement a client gets for running the genome test. Because of this, GenomOncology and others in the space of genomics as it relates to patient care are anxious that insurance carriers join the personalized medicine game.
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Glynias’ rationale: A fair amount of genome sequencing is already taking place in hospitals, academic research labs and companies. More and more research centers have purchased high-throughput sequencing machines (check out this cool world map of sequencing facilities) and there’s a clamoring consensus that personalized medicine is the unequivocal path forward.
“But it’s not clear to reimbursers, and that sort of silliness is holding us back more than the science is,” Glynias said.
Researchers are realizing, of course, that drugs work on mutated proteins – it doesn’t really matter what the mutated protein is – but the payors haven’t really caught on yet. Glynias hopes that large studies like the National Cancer Institute’s Match Trial – which is going to ignore tissue type and just dose drugs based on gene varients – will open insurance companies’ eyes.
“There’s a change of direction in medicine,” Glynias said. “We’ll see how fast reimbursers catch on.”
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The company’s GO Clinical Workbench produces an analysis report for clinicians that outlines whether or not a drug will work based on a person’s genome. It also indicates the level of evidence is for this assessment, and what clinical trials are available.
“Finding a variant is great, but if you don’t know what the variant does, there’s no point,” Glynias said. It has raised money twice – about $2 million overall from mostly angel investors in Cleveland. It has eight clients, including Vanderbilt University, Glynias said.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Jocelyn Wallace.