Mindera Health™ Announces Coverage with Evidence Project with Highmark, Inc. to Advance Moderate-to-Severe Psoriasis Patient Care and Reduce Specialty Drug Spending
Project will evaluate Mind.Px’s™ impact on physician “trial and error” prescribing behavior and overall net savings by prescribing the correct biologic class the first time
SAN DIEGO, CA – April 11, 2023 – Mindera Health™, the developer of Mind.Px, the first realization of precision medicine in psoriasis, has initiated a coverage with evidence project with Highmark Inc. and its health plan affiliates for Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Delaware. The program will evaluate trends in physician utilization, patient outcomes, drug switching, and overall net savings versus a control group.
In the United States, psoriasis affects more than three percent[i] of the population, leading to healthcare costs of more than $110 billion annually.ii Specialty drug spending for psoriasis is escalating at exponential rates, and biologics are often identified by payers, employers and pharmacy benefit managers as being in their top drug expenditures each year.[ii]I Furthermore, successful patient responses to currently available biologic treatments are roughly 52 percentiv, leading to trial-and-error patient treatments and increased healthcare costs.
Mind.Px is a predictive test that uses a dermal biomarker patch that allows for rapid and painless extraction of mRNA from skin, followed by transcriptomic analysis and machine learning-derived classifiers to provide actionable results for clinicians with >92 percent positive predictive valuev. By matching the patient to the right drug class before treatment begins, a recent study used a budget impact model to predict the potential costs savings associated with Mind.Px and returned annual cost savings ranging from $5,138 to $13,141 per patientvi.
“Use of Mind.Px can effectively minimize the trial-and-error approach to psoriasis treatment and provide physicians, patients, and payers with a powerful tool to guide the individual patient to an efficacious drug class based on their transcriptomics — the true vision of precision medicine,” commented George Mahaffey, President and CEO of Mindera Health. “We look forward to working with Highmark to accelerate the emergence of new technologies, like Mind.Px, to advance psoriasis patient care while reducing unnecessary spending.”
About Mind.Px™
Mind.Px is the flagship test of Mindera Health, designed to prospectively predict a patient’s response to expensive biologic drug classes prior to therapeutic selection and treatment. Using a scalable, minimally invasive dermal biomarker patch that captures over 7,000 biomarkers per sample along with data analytics, Mind.Px materially improves patient outcomes and significantly reduces healthcare system costs of expensive biologic treatments.
About Mindera Health™
Mindera Health is a private San Diego-area company developing and commercializing next-generation medical technology to enable a new era of skin analytics at the molecular level. Using a proprietary dermal biomarker patch, next-generation sequencing, and machine learning, Mindera Health technology generates clinically validated data to reduce healthcare system costs and improve patient outcomes. Mindera Health is a CLIA and CAP certified laboratory and has received ISO 13485:2016 certification. Find out more at www.minderahealth.com.
I Menter A, Strober BE, Kaplan DH, et al. Joint AAD-NPF guidelines of care for the management and treatment of psoriasis with biologics. J Am Acad Dermatol. 2019;80(4):1029-1072. doi:10.1016/j.jaad.2018.11.057.
ii Pilon D, Teeple A, Zhdanava M, et al. The economic burden of psoriasis with high comorbidity among privately insured patients in the United States. J Med Econ. 2019;22(2):196-203. doi:10.1080/13696998.2018.1557201.
iii Source: Prime Therapeutics 2012-2015 and 2019-2020 posters entitled “Prevalence and Cost of Autoimmune Specialty Drug Use by Indication.”
iv Enos CW, et al. Psoriasis severity, comorbidities, and treatment response differ among geographic regions in the United States. JID Innovations. 2021;1:100025.
v Mindera Health. Data on file.
vi Wu J, Montgomery P, Long B, et al. An economic evaluation of the budget impact of precision medicine testing for the treatment of psoriasis. SKIN The Journal of Cutaneous Medicine. 2021;5(4):372-387. doi:10.25251/skin.5.4.6
