AMCP Corporate Member Spotlight: Scipher Medicine
AMCP News & Views recently caught up with Alif Saleh, CEO, Scipher Medicine, to learn about his company and gain insights on becoming an AMCP corporate member.
What is your strategy and anticipated innovations for 2020?
Scipher has developed PrismRA®, a test that will improve patient outcomes for those suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, while also saving commercial payers billions of dollars each year. Tumor necrosis factor inhibitors (anti-TNFs) are the world’s largest selling drugs, however, about 66% of patients with rheumatoid arthritis who are prescribed such therapy don’t respond adequately – resulting in irreversible bone damage, increased opioid usage to manage pain, and significantly reduced overall health outcomes. PrismRA is a first-of-its-kind blood test that can predict which patients with rheumatoid arthritis are less likely to respond to anti-TNF therapies such as Humira® and Enbrel®, among others, so that such patients can go on alternative approved drugs.
Autoimmune diseases are complex and vary from patient to patient. Therapies are targeted, meaning they target a particular protein that overlaps with a patient’s molecular disease signature, or not. As a result, there is no one drug that works for everyone. At Scipher, we are accelerating precision medicine by building a platform capable of identifying a patient’s individual disease signature illuminating, on a molecular protein level, what’s causing the disease. With this information, we see clearly that patients with rheumatoid arthritis have different disease signatures and can be classified into subgroups that respond differently to different drugs. Our first commercial product is PrismRA, with expansion into other autoimmune diseases and therapies in the pipeline.
As you considered becoming a corporate member, what tipped the scales?
AMCP shares our goal of getting patients the drugs and drug therapies that are appropriate for them in a safe, convenient, and cost-effective manner. At Scipher, we are committed to transforming the way providers prescribe drugs as well as the way manufacturers develop new drugs. We have built a molecular map of all protein interactions that identifies genomic signatures and links those to disease and predictive treatment outcomes. Using a simple blood sample to analyze RNA, we can predict if a patient is likely to respond to a targeted therapy before therapy is prescribed. This insight allows patients to start the most effective therapy from day one. Our mission of using precision medicine to treat the individual complements AMCP’s mission of giving patients access to drugs that work from day one.
What’s your one-minute elevator speech about your company?
Most therapies are developed for the average patient, even though there is no such thing. As a result, patients have had to settle with the “fail-first” or “trial-and-error” treatment model of cycling through several drugs for years until finding one that works, which can be disastrous in many cases. There’s a clear unmet need to bring precision medicine to autoimmune diseases and change the way we develop and prescribe targeted therapies. At Scipher Medicine, we look at each individual patient and recognize that each patient’s disease is unique. Our platform identifies patient sub-populations within the same disease classification and determines which drug works best so that the most optimal therapy can be prescribed from day one. Being able to shift from a trial-and-error care model to a precision medicine-based approach in rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune disease is a groundbreaking change.
AMCP has nearly 90 corporate members working in concert with our valued individual members. Learn more and see our roster of corporate members.
