MOORESTOWN, N.J., Aug. 25, 2021 /- Tabula Rasa HealthCare, Inc.® (TRHC) (NASDAQ: TRHC), a leading healthcare technology company advancing the safe use of medications, and Hesperos Inc., pioneers of Human-on-a-Chip® in vitro systems, have been awarded $1.9 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to investigate drug-induced dementia and develop new models that will drive Alzheimer’s research.
Multi-drug intake can lead to adverse drug events (ADEs) and result in negative health outcomes like drug-induced dementia, including exacerbation of clinical manifestations of Alzheimer’s disease (a cause of dementia). Medications with certain properties are known to cause ADEs. When these ADEs are treated with additional medications, patients’ risk for multi-drug interactions increases.
“The prevalence of ADEs in the U.S. calls for innovative approaches that identify individuals at increased risk by considering drug pharmacological properties and conditions associated with multi-drug interactions,” said Jacques Turgeon, BPharm, PhD, TRHC Chief Scientific Officer and CEO of the TRHC Precision Pharmacotherapy Research and Development Institute (PPRDI). “This NIH grant brings together interdisciplinary organizations uniquely positioned for such research. We are proud the NIH has recognized our technologies and our expertise on ADEs and how they affect Alzheimer’s disease.”
The research will leverage TRHC’s MedWise® technology, which uses advanced proprietary algorithms to help quantify a patient’s risk for ADEs and assess the impact of certain drug properties as well as multi-drug interactions. The results will help address which medications and medication regimens correlate with the greatest risk of drug-induced dementia, relying on patient data and now benefiting from Hesperos AD models to better inform the MedWise technology to enable better predictive capabilities for patients.
“With further understanding of the causal link between medications and cognitive decline, we can take a critical step toward bettering patient outcomes,” said Veronique Michaud, BPharm, MSc, PhD, TRHC PPRDI Chief Operating Officer. “We’ve demonstrated our strategy to assess risk through peer-reviewed journal publications, and we look forward to enhancing it through the NIH grant.”
TRHC’s technology will work alongside experimental systems from Hesperos to support new models for Alzheimer’s research that advance predictive measures and ultimately help to reduce risk, hospitalizations, and medical costs. This grant enables two established commercial technologies to be combined to enable a new capability in the fight against Alzheimer’s.
“We look forward to collaborating with TRHC for this crucial project as it builds on our existing collaboration for predicting cardiac toxicity,” said James Hickman, PhD, Chief Scientist, and co-Founder for Hesperos.
According to Michael Shuler, PhD, CEO of Hesperos, “Our Human-on-a-Chip technology will provide valuable data on drug characteristics, which will help inform TRHC’s algorithms. Together, our technologies will offer a new approach to Alzheimer’s research.”
The project will span two years with funding from the NIH’s National Institute on Aging. It will incorporate a study of the blood-brain-barrier and enzymatic activity, complementing previous research. To learn more about TRHC and its PPRDI, visit us online here.
About Hesperos
Hesperos, Inc. is a leader in efforts to characterize an individual’s biology with Human-on-a-Chip microfluidic systems. Founders Michael L. Shuler and James J. Hickman have been at the forefront of every major scientific discovery in this realm, from individual organ-on-a-chip constructs to fully functional, interconnected multi-organ systems. With a mission to revolutionize toxicology testing as well as efficacy evaluation for drug discovery, the company has created pumpless platforms with serum-free cellular mediums that allow multi-organ system communication and integrated computational PKPD modeling of live physiological responses utilizing functional readouts from neurons, cardiac, muscle, barrier tissues and neuromuscular junctions as well as responses from liver, pancreas and barrier tissues. More information is available at https://hesperosinc.com.
Hesperos and Human-on-a-Chip are trademarks of Hesperos Inc. All other brands may be trademarks of their respective holders.
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