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CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (CBS19 NEWS) — A medical discovery has been made in Charlottesville that may help people who experience chronic pain, fatigue and brain fog.
AMPEL Biosolutions, a precision medicine company, came out with a new technique that may help determine what is going on for an individual patient and lead to better treatment options.
“This is a big problem. This is a clinical problem that is not addressed. And it’s a problem that tends to discount patients,” said CEO and Chief Medical Officer Peter Lipsky.
Lipsky said the usual diagnoses could be fibromyalgia, Lupus or nothing, which makes patients feel frustrated, like it’s in their head, or that no one will believe them.
“This study is the first report documenting the molecular signature in individual patients,” he said.
The company created a blood test called FibroGENE that examines the patient’s RNA.
“What we study is the RNA, the gene expression, and there are 20,000 in every cell of your body that can be on and off like light switches. So AMPEL’s platform technology is looking at groups of genes and from that being able to tell what cells and pathways are on or off,” said founder and President Amrie Grammer.
Once they discover what’s going on with each individual patient, AMPEL can figure out the best treatment.
“It will go a long way to really giving these people confidence that there is something wrong with them. Not just all in their head. Then it’s addressable by either available drugs or targeting with new drugs based on their molecular signatures,” said Lipsky.
The long-term goal is to have the blood test available in any doctor’s office that wants it, so that it can “be a routine test for disease management. To get the right drugs to the right person at the right time,” Grammer said.