For many people Living with depression, medication is an important part of managing the condition. But figuring out which one works for you can be a difficult process that takes months. Circular Genomics says its new genetic testing method can identify which drugs will work for a patient in less time.
As some of our readers no doubt know – depression affects hundreds of millions of people, after all – finding the right medication is fundamentally a bad thing. Your carrier will pick one that they think will meet your needs, then slowly increase the amount over a month or two, and if it doesn’t work, download it again and try a new one.
If you’re lucky, the first one works; If not, it may take months before you get to a size that works – if not resistant. And all the while, they’re living with under-treated depression, possibly exacerbated by the disruptive process of an ever-changing medication regimen.
Circular Genomics, presented today as part of TechCrunch Disrupt’s startup battleground, is taking on this big problem, a method of testing molecules inside our bodies that we’ve known about for decades but only recently begun to pay attention to. Circular RNA
DNA, as we all know, encodes our genes using a base code; When it’s time to make things, this code is processed and produces RNA, which directly specifies the proteins that will eventually be made, but is much easier to read than DNA or the proteins themselves.
The problem with RNA is that it degrades quickly, more or less by design: the ends of each strand are active and within a few hours the enzymes begin to unravel everything. But sometimes the two ends fuse and form “circular RNA”: the same molecule, but much, much longer.
“Circular types were discovered 5-10 years ago; we know they’ve been around since the 70s, but we won’t be able to extract them from the data until deep sequencing technologies are developed,” explained Alexander Hafez, founder and president of Circular Genomics. “Stability increases dramatically, from 18-24 hours to a week.” They will go.”
This is important because if you want to know what’s going on in the brain, RNA expression is your best bet – but you can’t extract it directly, and it’s already broken down by the time the blood takes it out of the brain. DNA and protein analysis are less helpful. But with the advent of new sequencing tools, that’s all about to change.
“Circular RNA is the first reliable biomarker that allows us to look at brain conditions,” Hafez said. Depression is the first target, especially what medication might be best for a person. The company has done two clinical studies so far: “We use blood samples, and we get an idea of class response — for example, whether or not you respond to an SSRI. Then we did another one where we could see if a patient would respond differently to Zoloft. (Zoloft is a commonly prescribed antidepressant.)
Having a baseline of what medication works can eliminate a great deal of unnecessary care: not just the medications themselves, but appointments, paperwork, insurance conflicts, hospital mishaps, etc. The overall cost of 6-12 months of care when someone works through the options is high, and that’s not even counting the more tangible costs of the process.
Hafez says circular RNA is rapidly expanding its presence in the biotech world. “When we started the company, there wasn’t much literature. Now it seems like every week there’s an article about how biomarkers are useful for cancer and other things.
Circular Genomics has a few patents pending, and they hold some IP as to the actual identification process – something that just anyone can do with sequencing and a little free time.
The company is currently working on further clinical trials to bring the product to market with confidence. But there are other applications on the horizon. Hafez may have discovered a biomarker for stress itself – which could be very useful.
“Our society has a huge stigma surrounding depression diagnosis and mental illness in general,” he said. But depression, like many other conditions, can be detected with a simple blood test, helping to remove that stigma. People who have trouble admitting depression to their own or someone else’s experience — or stubborn insurance companies, for that matter — may find a + sign on a blood test more persuasive. Of course, that opens the door to looking for biological markers for proof of mental illness, but we can cross that bridge when we get there.
Meanwhile, the company is still working out the best way to get the technology into the hands of patients. It may be an optional test that is not initially covered by insurance, costing around $1,000. Obviously that’s not accessible to everyone, but unlike many new approaches that don’t qualify for compensation, there are subsidies and other compensation that can come into play if the benefits are high.
