THERADIAG is a company that specializes in theranostics — a new therapeutic paradigm capable of diagnosis, drug delivery and monitoring therapeutic response. The company recently announced that anti-TNF monitoring, together with anti-TNF antibodies’ treatment in Crohn’s disease patients administered biotherapy, has a major impact on final costs of treatment, saving up to 25%, according to a recent economic report.

Michel Finance, Theradiag’s Chief Executive Officer, commented, “The results of a pharmacy-economic study highlight the value of Theradiag’s theranostic tests. Auto-immune diseases represent a major challenge for public health services and the cost to social security systems of using biotherapies is substantial, particularly for patients showing treatment resistance. The results of this study show economic benefits of using a monitoring test in patient management and the adoption of a personalized therapeutic approach. Lisa Tracker theranostic tests represent significant potential to control the cost of biotherapies, and could generate savings of more than €130mio.”

Currently used to treat disorders of the immune system such as Crohn’s disease, bio therapies — target-specific proteins involved in the inflammatory response — were frequently reported to trigger patients’ immune responses, leading to treatment unresponsiveness. Thus, when applying biologics, there is the need to monitor the treatment to help clinicians understand its efficacy or if other treatments or conditions are necessary.

The results came from a study performed with Crohn’s disease patients (3,000 and 10, 000) treated with anti-TNFα for different periods – 1, 3 and 5 years — in France. The authors determined an estimate of the cost of anti-TNF treatment (a frequent biologic drug used for Crohn’s disease) and measured the cost changes when a biological test was added (to further optimize the biotherapy).

The conclusions clearly demonstrated that introducing monitoring tests during therapeutics have a significant impact on health budgets, with a saving of 25% in 5 years treatment. The study was conducted in France where anti-TNF treatments is increasingly more frequent, and with costs rising to 16,000 euros per patient yearly. However, the conclusions can be extrapolated to other countries, such as the US, where biologics are also the current treatment for Crohn’s disease, but also other immune disorders, such as rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis.