Furthers mid- and long-term growth with strategic advance into pharmacogenomics and mental health
Castle executive management to host conference call and webcast today at 4:30 p.m. ET
Castle Biosciences, Inc., a company improving health through innovative tests that guide patient care, announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire AltheaDx, Inc. (AltheaDx).
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AltheaDx is a commercial-stage molecular diagnostics company specializing in the field of pharmacogenomics (PGx) testing services that are focused on mental health. IDgenetix is its PGx test for depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions.
“As a company, we focus on transforming disease management through the personalized information our innovative tests provide,” said Derek Maetzold, Castle’s president and chief executive officer. “Similar to our acquisition of Cernostics in December 2021, the pending acquisition of AltheaDx enables us to offer a testing solution that we believe has the potential to accelerate our impact on patient care in an area of high unmet clinical need, significantly expand our in-market expected estimated U.S. TAM to approximately $8 billion and offer incremental value to patients and clinicians over standard of care. Further, this acquisition would enable us to potentially develop a mental health franchise, starting with a test that currently receives Medicare reimbursement for depression.”
“Castle Biosciences has strong expertise in providing advanced tests that improve health and guide patient care, and we are excited to join the team,” said David Nikodem, Ph.D., chief executive officer of AltheaDx. “Precision medicine solutions, such as IDgenetix, have great potential as clinical decision support tools by providing critical genetic information to healthcare providers in pursuit of personalized care.”
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Maetzold continued, “Data from a randomized controlled clinical trial in patients diagnosed with moderate and severe depression and anxiety supported the clinical utility of IDgenetix over standard of care, when physicians used the test prior to prescribing a medication. The data demonstrated that in patients diagnosed with moderate and severe depression, response rates and remission rates were significantly higher in the IDgenetix-guided group as compared to the control group at 12 weeks. We believe two forward-looking decisions made by AltheaDx contributed to these study results. The first was recognizing that both drug-gene and drug-drug interactions may impact the effectiveness of individual therapies, and the second was their proprietary approach to analyzing genetic data.
“As it relates to the unmet clinical need, assessing treatment response is critical, particularly when considering response to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) because rates of response to these treatments varies from 40-60% of patients and remission rates range from 30-45%.1 We believe the value of IDgenetix lies in providing important genetic information to clinicians, with the potential to help improve their patients’ chances of response and/or remission, by identifying appropriate medications more efficiently than the standard of care trial-and-error approach.”
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