Patient tests pick best depression drugs

People with depression often cycle through several drugs before they find one that helps. Now, at least three companies say they can improve the odds that patients get the right therapy quickly.

CNS Response, AssureRx Health and Brain Resource are offering new tests designed to find physical and mental patterns that will predict the best treatment for individual patients. In doing so, they are also creating a new testing market that CNS Chief Executive Officer George Carpenter said may reach $2.7 billion a year in the United States.

Because there's no one cause for depression, a disorder that can overwhelm its victims with feelings of sadness, frustration and anger, no single medicine works the same for each patient. That can mean months of experimenting before treatment takes hold, an added burden for people already trying to maintain work and personal relationships.

Prescribing the right drug is "something we've struggled with for a long time," said Philip Muskin, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University in New York. "There are no hard criteria to say, use Prozac or Zoloft or any of the other famous antidepressants."

About 15.5 million people reported struggling with bouts of depression in a 2010 U.S. survey, and 11 percent of Americans 12 and older are treated for the disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Depression costs U.S. employers more than $34 billion a year in lost productivity and, in the worst cases, often leads to suicide, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an Arlington, Va., patient advocacy group.

Mark Schiller, a San Francisco psychiatrist, said he has seen patients who tried dozens of medicines for their depression without any relief. Now, he uses the CNS test, on the market since May 2011, to help eliminate the guessing game.

The CNS system works sort of like a dating service - only instead of pairing personalities, it matches electrical activity that's recorded in the brain.

If a number of people with similar brain waves do well on the same medicine, then that drug will probably work for the new patient as well, CNS' Carpenter said. The Southern California company has a database of about 8,700 people that new patients can be compared with, he said.

CNS charges a fee of $400 to $800 depending on the type of buyers, and more than 100 psychiatrists are using its data, Carpenter said. The company's database that doctors access to get the reports was registered last year with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a medical device data system.

AssureRx, in Mason, Ohio, has taken a different route from CNS with a system that's based on a genetic test.

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Patient tests pick best depression drugs