A Genetic Method to Predict the Effects of Personalized Treatments for Sexual Dysfunction in Women

There is a strict embargo on this press release and article until the time of its scheduled publication (March 5th, 2021 at 2pm ET). The link to the article, which will go live upon publication: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0246828 

ALMERE, Netherlands, March 4, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The influential open access journal PLOS ONE published an article today on a personalized medicine approach directed at the treatment of low sexual desire and arousal in women (Daniël Höhle, et al). Sexual functioning and its problems are - in general - affected by both biological and psychological mechanisms. This article deals with a personalized medical approach to sexual problems, and thus has a primarily biological perspective. Two subtypes possibly with different underlying mechanisms responsible for the condition Female Sexual Interest / Arousal Disorder (FSIAD) are distinguished: 1) Women who have relatively insensitive systems in the brain to sexual stimuli and 2) women who are prone to activation of sexual inhibition in the brain when exposed to sexual stimuli (but have a normal to high sensitivity to sexual stimuli). Two different on-demand drugs have been developed in line with these mechanisms. This article describes the development of a new genetic method (suitable for small groups) based on Phenotype Prediction Scores (PPS) using Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs). SNPs are the genetic variations between human. This method has resulted in two PPS formulas, which can be used to predict for each drug individually whether an individual patient will show a positive or negative (or no) response to their feelings of sexual satisfaction. In other words, the formulas predict who will be responders to the drugs and who are not. Two drugs for FSIAD have already been registered for the US market, but the development of these products is based on a so-called "one-fits-all" approach. Due to the described approach that has been chosen here, the effectiveness for the described drugs is on average 3 times higher (with a low number of negative side effects) than the medicines that have been developed based on one-fits-all. In short, the research shows for both developed PPS formulas that they can reliably predict who will benefit from each of the on-demand drugs and could therefore be potentially useful in clinical practice.

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SOURCE Emotional Brain BV