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Suicide-Gene Test Could Spawn Customized Drugs
Test finds genes linking suicidal ideas and antidepressant. Designer medicine?
Sept. 30 -- After years of unfulfilled promises, genomics finally seems poised to impact health care. Research from the National Institute of Mental Health has associated two genetic markers with suicidal thoughts in patients who take the antidepressant drug Celexa.
And an enterprising company called NeuroMark is piggybacking on the discovery, already offering a test for those gene markers.
"We think this test represents the leading edge of personalized medicine," said Kim Bechthold, CEO of NeuroMark, which produced the Mark-C test. "And (it's) a first in neuropsychiatry."
Genetic testing has been done for years, but most research has focused on rare diseases like cancer or Huntington's disease, so the impact on public health has been limited. And the Human Genome Project, launched more than a decade ago and completed in 2003, promised to revolutionize health care but has led to few breakthroughs so far.
The latest genetic tests, however, could put a dent in the large number of serious health problems and deaths caused by adverse drug reactions in the United States. Problems such as a disability or life-threatening hospitalization caused by prescription drugs more than doubled between 1998 and 2005 to 468,000, as did the number of deaths, to nearly 90,000.
In September, the FDA approved the first personlized genetic test for people who take a specific drug. The test, developed by Nanosphere, helps identify patients who might be at risk for complications when taking a frequently prescribed blood-thinning drug called warfarin.
Celexa has been prescribed to 8 million people in the United States and 30 million worldwide, according to the drug's manufacturer Forest Labs.
NeuroMark's test, which doesn't require FDA approval but has passed the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments regulatory standards, will be available Monday for $500. The NeuroMark test includes the two suicidal-ideation genes identified in the new trial, plus two more that NIMH researchers will discuss in an upcoming paper, Bechtold said.
