Depression doesn't look alike for everyone – so why should the treatments for it?

"I've always been perplexed at how we are supposed to treat all these manifestations with the same treatment," said Dr. Hans Eriksson, chief clinical development officer at HMNC Brain Health, in an interview with Healthcare IT News. "Our thinking is that many of these psychiatric disorders have subsets of individuals that would respond particularly well to certain interventions," he said. Eventually, he said, "You can use proteomics data, looking at the proteins in the blood; you could look at transcriptomics to see what genes are transcribed; you could look at cognition, psychological variables, and feed this information into an algorithm to find the patients that are more likely to respond to certain intervention. "So now we not only have the medication, we also have the tool to find the individuals, and now is the point in time where we can start playing precision psychiatry," said Eriksson. "So this is the thinking: To find subsets of individuals using biological tools or psychological tools, and hopefully, in the future, to identify this subset, and then offer them a treatment that is specifically tailored to that biological finding," Eriksson said. He said the company is interested in developing a genetic test to find patients that would have particularly good reactions to these kinds of treatments, and who would be less likely to experience negative side effects. "And I think it's all about the provider of the medication – whether that's the physician or the pharmaceutical company – not to push the medication on every patient, because in the long run, that is not what is beneficial," he said. Overall, he said, a variety of factors are driving a potentially innovative approach to treating depression and other mental health disorders. "If we could get to the right medication earlier, it would be very helpful to individuals, because depression is a really painful state," he said.