Sept. 5. BusinessWeek "Drugs Get Smart"

I dont have permission to print this so I hope I dont go to jail. I guess if someone wants me to remove it, I will....but I think its an interesting thing for us BP people to be aware of. A friend sent me the info about the article, I'm very glad she did...

Anneke Westra has experienced the power of Roche's diagnostic technology. Eleven years ago, at 30, she was a promising scientist with a PhD in biotechnology who already had a patent to her name. Despite a lifelong struggle with depression, she became an expert in biosensors, traveling the world to present scientific papers. That changed in September, 1994, when the Londoner was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

It was the start of a decade-long debacle. Westra's treatment involved a dozen psychiatrists and 18 pharmaceuticals -- each drug, it seemed, with worse side effects than the one before. Her mental and physical health deteriorated. Frequently hospitalized and unable to work, she eventually tried to kill herself. "I lost 10 years of my life from the drugs I was given," she says.

Westra's case is extreme but not unique, and it explains why doctors and patients both are eager for personalized medicine. One in five people at some point suffer depression severe enough for medication. Many spend months trying a variety of drugs, at different dosages, before hitting on a prescription that works -- if they're lucky. For 25% of patients, the most common antidepressants -- selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac -- are ineffective. Millions more are wracked by side effects. Until Roche launched its AmpliChip, there was no reliable means of monitoring the family of enzymes found mainly in the liver, known as CYP450, that dictate how our bodies break down medication. That left trial and error -- and a trail of tears.

After her diagnosis, Westra spent the next few years in and out of the hospital, but no matter what drugs doctors prescribed, terrible side effects set in almost immediately. Promazine knocked her unconscious for five days, while within four days of taking Eli Lilly's Zyprexa she was hearing voices in a drug-induced state of psychosis. "No one believed me when I told them I was being poisoned by the drugs," she says.

Finally she found a psychiatrist who prescribed a mild tranquilizer, and she improved. Rested and thinking clearly for the first time in years, Westra deduced that her troubles had something to do with the way her body metabolized medication. In just three hours of exploring medical Web sites, "I worked out what it might be," she recalls. "I was crying with relief."

Her research led her to Dr. Katherine J. Aitchison at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London, who confirmed Westra's suspicions. Using the AmpliChip test, Aitchison found Westra had too little of two drug-metabolizing enzymes in her liver, making her acutely sensitive to numerous medications.

Millions of people may be like Westra, according to Dr. José de León, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Kentucky and medical director of the mental health research center at Eastern State Hospital in Lexington. In a study published in the January issue of The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, de León found that patients without the CYP2D6 enzyme -- one that Westra had too little of -- were three to six times more likely to experience severe side effects when placed on the antipsychotic risperidone. Now he's conducting a study on 4,000 psychiatric patients at three state hospitals in Kentucky to determine if testing patients for these genetic variations before prescribing is cost-effective.

Westra, 41, finally has her life back. She takes minuscule amounts of three psychiatric drugs, and uses homeopathic remedies. "I used to fall into a a suicidal depression that would last nine months. Now the depression lifts in two weeks. That never happened before." In addition to advising mental health practitioners, she's the co-founder of Britain's No Force Campaign, which lobbies against forced medication of the mentally ill. And while she has testified calmly before Parliament on the topic, she's still angry at the health-care system that let her down. "I have been through a nightmare, only to discover it never should have happened," she says. "The information was out there."