Editor, Rebekah Jordan, sat with Mark Bagnall, CEO of Phenomix Sciences, to understand how the company is redefining the way obesity disease is treated with precision medicine to allow for better treatment decisions and patient outcomes.
Key insights:
- Obesity is currently classed as one disease but has recently been divided into four subtypes.
- By using phenotyping to identify the obesity subtype a patient has, treatments can be personalised for patients, increasing treatment adherence, effectiveness and outcomes.
- Evidence has been published to show that treatments based on a patient’s specific phenotype results in better patient outcomes than treatments solely suggested by physicians.
In 2013, the AMA medically classified obesity as a disease. In the same year, two Mayo Clinic doctors, both GI specialists working in the field of obesity, began to work on the problem of variability in response to obesity treatments. They discovered that obesity was not one disease but at least four, each of which are mechanistically different. After several years of research, they founded Phenomix Sciences in 2020, to scale their discoveries and bring personalised medicine to the obesity field by phenotyping.