Judges picked Parallel Profiles as the winner of the health IT track at MedCity INVEST.
Cathy Cather, a former senior vice president at HealthAllies, was consulting with healthcare startups when a series of events changed her life. After a surgery, her husband was rushed to the ICU for an adverse drug reaction.
Six months later, her mother was hospitalized from an adverse drug reaction, and a close friend died from a medication they were taking.
“When that happened for the third time, I went wait a minute, is it just that I noticed it and other people don’t?” Cather said in a phone interview. “It turns out that it happens 2.7 million times a year that somebody notices.”
She got a pharmacogenetic test for her husband and spent hours poring over the 36-page report. She ordered a similar test for her mom, and found out she never should have been on the medication she was taking.
“I thought, this is life-changing,” she said.
Based on that experience, she started Parallel Profile, a startup to make it easier to check for adverse drug reactions and interpret testing results. Last week, a panel of judges selected the Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based startup at the winner of the health IT track for MedCity INVEST’s Pitch Perfect contest.
Though adverse drug reactions are rare, studies estimate that roughly 7% of hospitalized patients experience one. Pharmacogenetic testing is seldom used in clinical practice, in part because of challenges in ordering tests and interpreting results.
Parallel Profile screens users for more than 1,000 commonly prescribed medications where a genetic variant could impact their care. The idea is to check for three potential issues: whether a drug would be toxic to that person, whether a different dose would be needed, or whether a drug simply won’t work for them.
To determine whether people have a genetic risk factor for an adverse drug reaction, the startup uses public data from the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC). After ordering the test and consulting with a physician, users mail in a cheek swab, which is sent to one of the laboratories with which Parallel Profile partners.
Once they know their genetic variants, Parallel Profile builds a summary of those results that is easy to understand. For example, it shows what brand name drugs are tied to each chemical name. It can also pull in information on what medications users are currently taking to flag potential drug interactions. Users can update this summary over time with new prescriptions or diagnoses that might affect their care.
The system is currently being piloted by four large companies that are part of the Employer Health Innovation Roundtable. Employers will cover the test for people who face an increased risk of an adverse reaction, such as people who are taking more than four medications, or who are taking high-risk medications, such as anticoagulants. Then, testing is considered for people who are taking drugs with high failure rates, such as chemotherapy, behavioral health medications, or expensive specialty medications.
Parallel Profile charges $599 per panel, though the price can vary depending on the size of the employer. It expects to reach profitability in its first operating year.
Siddharth Sridhar, a corporate development associate with Centene and one of the judges at MedCity INVEST, said Parallel Profile was selected as the winner of the pitch competition because the company had a traction with a strong core group of customers and was cash flow positive.
For Cather, the goal is to prevent future adverse drug reactions, and help people determine if any of the drugs they’re taking aren’t working.
“We save lives, we reduce harm. A lot of things that happen with these adverse reactions, is even if they survive, there’s this lifelong damage,” Cather said. “That is what we do: making life-saving science accessible.”
