Octave’s Precision Care Solution Aims to Better Tailor MS Treatment

Octave announced the commercial availability of a multiple sclerosis (MS) care program that examines various facets of a person’s disease to help determine the best course of treatment and management that’s tailored to an individual.

The program, called MS Precision Care Solution, combines blood biomarker analyses to monitor disease activity with MRI scans of the brain and spinal cord, as well as an app that enables real-time tracking of MS symptoms and support from the company’s certified nurse care partners between clinical visits.

“We are thrilled to be offering the MS community our Precision Care Solution, for which we have completed validation studies and continue to advance,” William Hagstrom, founder and CEO of Octave, a digital health sciences company, said in a press release.

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“The solution addresses the challenges associated with disease at both a patient and a population level [and] facilitates informed, insightful care,” Hagstrom added. “We believe that better measurement leads to better management decisions that can profoundly impact care delivery and outcomes.”

Its use could also help to lower healthcare costs by reducing patient hospitalizations, emergency room visits, MRI scans, and lab testing, the release stated.

Currently, Octave Solution is being used at MS centers that include the Michigan Institute for Neurological Disorders (MIND), the Pickup Family Neurosciences Institute in California, the MS Center for Innovations in Care at Missouri Baptist Medical Center, and the Center for Neurology and Spine/MS Center of Arizona.

“The level of innovation achieved by Octave and its research partners is unmatched in the MS space,” said Martin Belkin, MD, medical director of the MS Center at MIND. “The Precision Care Solution provides those of us who have been working to treat this disease with more comprehensive and scientific tools and information than we have seen to date.”

Octave recently reported that its blood biomarker test could efficiently monitor overall disease activity in people with MS. Called the MS Disease Activity (MSDA) test, the assay measures the levels of 18 proteins, showing which pathways and mechanisms related to MS are activated and to what extent.

These measures are used to generate scores for each disease pathway. To date, clinical test results presented at major disease conferences “show that the MSDA multivariate blood test component is highly associated with multiple disease activity endpoints, and is significantly superior to the top performing univariate biomarker,” Octave stated.

“Despite major advances in MS treatment over the past two decades, neurologists like myself need more sophisticated tools in the clinic to assess for predictors of disease worsening,” said Barry Singer, MD, director of the MS Center for Innovations at Missouri Baptist.

“Octave’s cutting-edge toolkit, including their validated blood biomarker panel and brain volume measurements, allows clinicians to improve monitoring and care of their MS patients in a more comprehensive way than we have been able to previously,” he added.