Coriell Life Sciences
Personalized Medication Specialists

No two individuals are alike. The same applies to how each body responds to medications—the results vary from one person to another. When two different people consume the same pill, it could result in one person getting better while the other ends up hospitalized with an adverse reaction. “This difference in outcomes is often caused by variations in the human genome – variations which exist as the result of humans having evolved to process different chemicals and toxins in the environments where we migrated to live,” explains Scott Megill, President, and CEO of Coriell Life Sciences (CLS).

Knowing how these variations in DNA impact individual medicines is critical to treatment success, but it is not sufficient alone to provide the necessary guidance to physicians for complex medication plans. To this end, CLS offers a comprehensive medication risk management program for the healthcare sector. The company sets the gold standard in genetic interpretation and reporting and offers solutions that positively empower physicians and pharmacists to more precisely prescribe treatments with a greater degree of success.

Coriell Life Sciences began its journey in 2013 by focusing on the study of human DNA and differences in response to medications. “Building on our research, we developed a bioinformatics solution that could interpret the pharmacogenomic laboratory results and couple it with traditional medication management risk factors to deliver a dynamic regimen modeling tool,” says Megill.

At the core of CLS’ services and solutions lies its real-time medical decision support and modeling tool, GeneDose LIVE. The unique system provides physicians with updated medication risk information for their patient’s current medication regimen and offers alternatives for safer therapy, all in real-time. GeneDose LIVE also provides risk analysis of non-genetic factors such as lifestyle, drug interactions, age-related risks, and other concerns along with a personalized medication action plan (MAP) that shows medications best suited for an individual. The services are offered to payers in the US, single-payer systems, public sector entities, self-insured employers, and international government healthcare systems. By matching people with the right medications, Coriell Life Sciences’ solution offers patients benefits like fewer hospitalizations, less unneeded testing, and reduced doctor’s visits, ultimately decreasing healthcare costs. Most importantly, CLS’s program reduces costly medication experimentation and speeds the patient’s return to good health.

Building on GeneDose LIVE’s success, CLS has facilitated population-wide rollouts of CorigenTM, a turnkey program that comprises genetic testing and expert pharmacy review using GeneDose LIVE. Corigen initially scans the population of an organization or a particular group to perform an analysis of who can benefit from the intervention offered by Coriell Life Sciences’ solution.

With our solution, the physician receives a direct recommendation for medication change — to take a patient off a particular pill and put them on a different one

It then determines an estimated ROI on implementing a pharmacogenomicempowered medication management program, for which the CLS team handles the enrollment, kitting, testing, reviews, interpretation, and reporting.

While collaborating with a customer, CLS initially runs a risk-free, predictive population analysis demonstration of its plug-and-play Corigen solution to help them understand the solution’s benefits. The team then works with them right from chalking an implementation plan through the solution’s launch and beyond to ongoing reporting and analysis. Megill cites the case of their public sector client, the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Kentucky (TRS), with 36,000+ retired teachers who have their healthcare benefits provided through their workers’ pension. As this pension was responsible for ensuring the best healthcare, they were in search of programs that could help them reduce costs and improve the health of their members and, as a result, reached out to Coriell Life Sciences for a proposal. After its demonstration, CLS launched the program three years ago, and not only were they able to provide the client with the key success factors, they also obtained positive health and economic outcomes for the population. The Corigen program demonstrated a plan charge savings of 14% for those members who participated.

What makes Coriell Life Sciences unique is its ability to bring together the different aspects of medication management and deliver it seamlessly to a physician’s workflow. “With our solution, the physician receives a direct recommendation for medication change — to take a patient off a particular pill and put them on a different one,” said Megill.

Time and again, CLS’s technology has proven itself with its ability for risk identification and providing testing to those who need it. In the current pandemic situation, the company has brought three product lines specific to COVID-19, including a command and control center decision support system that helps organizations planning to bring their employees back to the office in identifying the right testing schedule for each individual based on their exposure, health risks, and the progression of the disease in the area they live and work.

Another COVID-19 specific product launched by the company is related to its pharmacogenomics roots. The solution suggests the right medication and treatment plan that works for a COVID-19 positive individual. Additionally, CLS also plays a general contractor role to ensure that the right labs, be it national, global, or local, are matched with an organization to conduct their employees’ COVID-19 tests. As a part of its offering, CLS also does COVID-19 reporting and interpretation for the laboratories.

The future looks promising for Coriell Life Sciences as the company continues to collaborate with some of the major healthcare providers in the industry. The team is also expanding its reach to insurance companies, pharmacy benefit management enterprises, and organizations that offer healthcare management software such as EHR. “We aim to be the gold standard for knowledge and understanding of pharmacogenomics,” Megill concludes.