McKesson Advances Personalized Medicine Strategy with Proventys Agreement

Business Wire, Feb 20, 2008

Predictive risk assessment technologies provide clinical decision support for individualized care

ATLANTA -- McKesson today announced a strategic relationship with Proventys, Inc., a personalized medicine knowledge service provider that utilizes cutting-edge predictive modeling to enable personalized clinical decisions at the point of care. Personalized medicine integrates genetic and other individual risk factors to enable prediction and therefore prevention of disease and adverse responses to medications and other therapies. McKesson plans to incorporate Proventys' risk prediction capabilities into the core clinical decision support solutions.

Founded by prospective medicine luminary and Duke University Chancellor Emeritus Ralph Snyderman, M.D., Proventys translates predictive data from traditional and emerging diagnostic tests, including genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, into clinical decision support solutions.

"As a leader in the transformation of healthcare, McKesson is innovating now for the way medicine will be practiced in the very near future," said Michael E. Myers, McKesson's senior vice president and general manager of Life Sciences. "This agreement is an important element of our overall strategy to offer vital new capabilities for personalized clinical decision making. Our goal is to use technology to support patient involvement in their individualized, prospective health planning. The unparalleled knowledge base from Proventys will be an important contribution to our Horizon Knowledge Center[TM] clinical content offering."

Dr. Snyderman, chairman of Proventys, has played a leading role in the emerging healthcare paradigm known as prospective medicine, which focuses on personalized risk prediction in order to prevent disease, versus waiting for disease to occur and then treating it, often in its acute or chronic stages.

"Chronic disease degrades the quality of life and longevity for a vast and increasing number of people," Snyderman explained. "Inefficient spending on the acute treatment of chronic disease has exploded in the United States and accounts for nearly three-quarters of all healthcare expenses. "Until recently, our best preventative or therapeutic attempts were based on general patient variables, or on one-size-fits-all treatment regimens. Proventys is leading the industry toward a new individualized approach to healthcare by integrating the latest advances in using risk factors derived from clinical research data and biomarkers with state-of-the-art bioinformatics technologies to develop personalized clinical predictive models to thereby inform better clinical decisions."

Dr. Snyderman is the recipient of the 2007 "Leadership in Personalized Medicine" award from the Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC) for his efforts in advancing predictive and targeted therapies on a national scale. During his 15 years as Duke's Chancellor for Health Affairs and Dean of the School of Medicine, Dr. Snyderman oversaw the development of the Duke University Health System, one of the nation's most successful integrated academic health systems and served as its first president and chief executive officer.

"The work we will do together will help to define a new healthcare delivery system focused on supporting the next generation of medicine," said Pamela Pure, president of McKesson Technology Solutions. "Physicians already struggle to make effective, informed, efficient care decisions based on the numerous patient variables they must consider when providing treatment. As those variables increase exponentially over the next few years, physicians will require increasingly sophisticated clinical decision support tools to help them. Through our personalized medicine strategy, McKesson is well positioned to lead the industry in developing these next generation capabilities."

About McKesson

McKesson Corporation, currently ranked 18th on the FORTUNE 500, is a healthcare services and healthcare information technology company dedicated to helping its customers deliver high-quality healthcare by reducing costs, streamlining processes, and improving the quality and safety of patient care. McKesson is the longest-operating company in healthcare today, marking its 175th anniversary this year. Over the course of its history, McKesson has grown by providing pharmaceutical and medical-surgical supply management across the spectrum of care; healthcare information technology for hospitals, physicians, homecare and payors; hospital and retail pharmacy automation; and services for manufacturers and payors designed to improve outcomes for patients. For more information, visit http://www.mckesson.com.

About Proventys

Proventys, Inc. is a personalized medicine knowledge service provider focused on delivering cutting-edge risk prediction technology to power personalized clinical decisions at the point of care. Through its proprietary risk assessment architecture, the company is able to harness the power of clinical data along with emerging diagnostic tests, including biomarkers from the fields of genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, to power personalized medicine at the point of care. This breakthrough enables clinicians to select more effective, targeted approaches to improve clinical and economic outcomes for each individual patient. Founded in 2004 by Ralph Snyderman, M.D., Chancellor Emeritus of Duke University, Proventys is located in Durham, North Carolina. For more information, visit www.proventys.com.