Myriad Genetics, a global leader in personalized medicine has announced the results from a large commercial cohort and several clinical studies on development of the adjusted Vectra score that were published in the journal Rheumatology. The key findings are that the adjusted Vectra score significantly outperformed conventional measures of disease activity in predicting radiographic progression (new joint damage) in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA).

“This study showed that the adjusted Vectra score was the strongest individual predictor of new radiographic joint damage over one year in patients with RA,” said Jerry Lanchbury, Ph.D., chief scientific officer, Myriad Genetics. “In these analyses, the adjusted Vectra score was three times more predictive of radiographic joint damage than DAS28-CRP and five times more predictive than DAS28* and was significantly better than other disease activity measures commonly used by clinicians today.”

This large study included a cohort of more than 300,000 commercially tested patients with RA and 1,411 RA patients from a clinical trial/registry cohort. An adjusted Vectra DA score was developed to account for three factors known to impact inflammation: age, gender, and degree of adiposity proxied either by serum leptin level or body mass index (BMI). In addition, the adjusted Vectra scores were evaluated for their ability to predict radiographic progression (RP) and compared with other disease activity measures, including DAS28, DAS28-CRP, SDAI, and CDAI.

The results showed that the leptin-adjusted Vectra score was 5.5 times more predictive of radiographic progression, the BMI-adjusted Vectra score was 4.6 times more predictive, and the original Vectra score was four times more predictive when compared to DAS28. Importantly, Vectra also outperformed the other common measures evaluated in this study.

“The Vectra test allows one to identify patients with a high degree of inflammatory activity, which can lead to join damage progression,” said Elena Hitraya, M.D., Ph.D., chief medical officer, Myriad Autoimmune. “This study showed that the adjusted Vectra score significantly improved ability to predict radiographic progression and thus, it provides valuable information to clinicians that they can incorporate into the individual patient treatment plans”.