Saladax hiring to meet demand for test that monitors schizophrenia drug

While much of the attention in health care tech is related to finding tests and vaccines for COVID-19, other local developers in the industry are also making innovations.

Saladax Biomedical, a company that makes drug monitoring tests, has announced its growing. The company, located in the Ben Franklin TechVentures in Bethlehem has hired eight new staffers to help it ramp up its production of a test used to monitor medication treatment for patients with schizophrenia.

Saladax has hired staff in R&D, operations, regulatory affairs and sales.

While not technically COVID-19-related, the pandemic has increased public focus on psychiatric disorders, as more individuals are affected by depression and other conditions because of isolation.

In a press release, Saladax noted that it is estimated that schizophrenia affects 1% of the population or approximately 3.5 million Americans. Of those, 25-30% of patients with schizophrenia have treatment-resistant schizophrenia and are either non-responsive to, or intolerant of conventional antipsychotic medications.

For those patients, the only treatment approved and recommended by the American Psychiatric Association guidelines is Clozapine. Saladax is producing a MyCarePsychiatry Clozapine Assay Kit, that is a rapid blood test that measures Clozapine levels in patients. Salvatore Salamone, Saladax president and CEO, said it is the only commercial test available in the U.S.

He noted that in other countries, Clozapine is prescribed as much as eight times more than in the U.S., and underutilization of the medication is a concern to many in the industry. The availability of the Clozapine Assay Kit is important to enable and improve the utilization of the drug, he said.

The “MyCare Psychiatry Line of tests reflects our commitment to bringing crucial clinical tools to mental health practitioners to help them make informed decisions and enhance patient care,” Salamone said. “MyCare tests will support practitioners who are contending with schizophrenic conditions in their patients.”

Clozapine is the first test in the MyCare Psychiatry line available in the US.  It received approval from the Federal Food & Drug Administration in July.

The MyCare Psychiatry line also includes tests for quetiapine, aripiprazole, risperidone, olanzapine and paliperidone.