Helps them select from those drugs So today they're using trial and error And we hope that very soon they start using really precision immunology testing like prism RA to get the best possible treatment to their patients at the earliest possible time Explain for our listeners who are unfamiliar with the impact and the disease itself rheumatoid arthritis how debilitating it can become Of course there's about 1.6 million people in the U.S. today who suffer from rheumatoid arthritis This is a complicated disease It really is the body's own defense system attacking specific parts of itself And what is required really is a way to quiet that and the complicating factor is without suppressing the immune system because the body still needs that for that defense Patients today will suffer from rheumatoid arthritis if it's left untreated or not treated well ultimately wind up stopping work within ten years of the diagnosis because not only do they feel the pain that's swelling in the tenderness but they'll start to suffer from deformity lack of mobility and all kinds of other physical limitations when the disease takes its course It seems as a race of years we've heard a lot more about autoimmune disorders and diseases It's a combination clip I like to think of it as we're doing a phenomenal job of preventing treating and curing other diseases Those that are less complicated You look at our ability of course to build out studies and to have an vaccine for a viral illness that quickly as we have during the COVID pandemic period we can't do that for these more complicated diseases What we actually need to do is to work to really understand the individual reason not the diagnostic reason but the specific reasons leading to that individual disease course and then find the right solution to stop it at the individual level So explain again how this blood test works And at what point during the stage of either I think I have RA do I have RA somebody physician says I might at what point is this blood test used Explain how that works Of course I think that there's a need for a diagnosis first So at the first step is someone starts to feel the initial pain the swelling and the tenderness that potentially could come from RA they would basically ultimately move from a primary care provider to a specialist the rheumatologist who would diagnose them definitively with RA At that point the room mythologists really has at his or her disposal multiple different types of treatment options In today's world they would then move to trial and error The 1.6 million patients today that have this disease many of them are very well controlled and stable but many of them are not and they're currently at risk of switching drugs having their doses escalated and ultimately not having the solution yet for what it is that will keep this disease in check in their system All of those patients those newly diagnosed and those that aren't on a stable drug regimen that's working for them are eligible for prism RA as a blood test of simple blood draw to really give the doctor a clue as to what's happening molecularly in the patient's body what they can't see with their naked eye to then prescribe the best possible treatment for those specific patients Is it an indication or a sign that medicine and the medical field getting a lot better Absolutely One of my biggest things that I look back on and celebrate as a physician is we're no longer treating individuals by a diagnosis You're not treating the diabetic in room 12 or the RA patients in room ten You're treating Sam and Sam's disease And you're learning as to what is driving down disease state and molecularly the things that you can't see with the naked eye And then you're treating it and the benefit of that is not only does the physician but also the patient gets to see those benefits They know that their drug is working They start to see improvements in their disease state and they really have confidence that that type of prescription was really delivered to them or ordered for them specific to their molecular makeup And that's a huge achievement for us As we really think about all the different ways that we've moved from population health to personalized medicine That's doctor Sam is Gary and chief medical officer at cipher medicine at I'm cleve Albert kogo news wherever news happens stay connected stay informed News radio 600 kogo Donna here and I want to talk to you.