San Diego, CA, Aug. 19, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Mindera Health, developer of Mind.Px™, the first realization of precision medicine in psoriasis, has completed the credentialling process to become a Medi-Cal provider making its services available to the over 15 million Californians that rely on the state’s Medicaid program for health insurance coverage.
In the United States, psoriasis affects more than three percenti of the population. Moderate-to-severe disease severity accounts for approximately one-third of psoriasis diagnoses.ii This auto-immune condition often leads to absenteeism or major problems at work, depression, and other clinical comorbidities.ii Specialty drug spending for psoriasis is escalating exponentially, and biologics are often identified by payers, employers, and pharmacy benefit managers as being in their top drug expenditures each year.iii Furthermore, successful patient responses to currently available biologic treatments are roughly 52 percentiv, leading to trial-and-error treatment selection and increased healthcare costs.
Mind.Px is a predictive test that uses a patented dermal biomarker patch allowing 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 >91 percent positive predictive value.v By leveraging precision medicine and matching the patient to the right drug class before treatment begins, clinical outcomes can be improved while biologic drug expenditures are optimized.
“We are delighted to have the opportunity to serve the 1 in 3 Californian’s insured as Medi-Cal beneficiaries,” says Ron Rocca, CEO of Mindera Health. “We look forward to partnering with the largest single payer in our home state and its affiliated managed care plans to address the rising costs and optimize clinical outcomes associated with biologic therapy in plaque psoriasis.”
About Medi-Cal™
According to the Californian Health Care Foundation, Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program, is the state’s health insurance program for Californians with low income, including nearly four in ten children, one in five nonelderly adults, and two million seniors and people with disabilities. In total, over 15 million Californians – one in three – rely on the program for coverage. Medi-Cal pays for essential primary care, specialty, acute, behavioral health and long-term care services.
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.
About Mind.Px™
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 >91 percent positive predictive value[v]. 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 patient[vi].
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):10291072. doi:10.1016/j.jaad.2018.11.057.
ii Van Voorhees AS, et al. The Psoriasis and Psoriatic Arthritis Pocket Guide, 7th ed. Table 2-3. https://psoriasis.org/the-pocket-guide.
iii Prime Therapeutics 2012-2015 and 2019-2020 posters titled “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 Bagel J, Wang Y, Montgomery P III, et al. A machine learning-based test for predicting response to psoriasis biologics.SKIN The Journal of Cutaneous Medicine. 2021;5(6):621-638. doi:10.25251/skin.5.6.5
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