When the federal government reversed course last month, deciding not to regulate many genetic tests, one big winner was Proove Biosciences, a Southern California company that markets an unproven “opioid risk” test.
Proove claims its test can predict, with 93 percent accuracy, which patients will become addicted to or misuse prescribed opioid pain pills. That’s been an irresistible sales pitch for many physicians, who struggle to treat pain patients compassionately but fear adding to the national epidemic of opioid addiction. The Irvine, Calif., company has recruited 400 doctors, who have used the test to guide their treatment of more than 100,000 patients in the last five years.
But STAT has found that the opioid risk test lacks a firm scientific basis. Genetics and addiction experts — including one of Proove’s medical advisers — said genetic testing isn’t able to predict addiction, and questioned the evidence used to back up the company’s accuracy claim. Erroneous results could misinform doctors and lead them to unnecessarily refuse opioids to patients suffering severe pain, the experts warned.
Brian Meshkin is a thief and a crook with no ethical or moral foundation to run a healthcare company. Unlike other fields, healthcare is highly structured. Everything follows a standard process to ensure the safety and security of the patient. This means there is little or no room for creativity. Brian Meshkin is by nature a con man and charlatan who will do anything including bending the rules to make money. Such a psychopathic personality inevitably puts him on a collision course with the authorities.
It is a shame the system didn’t stop a giant scam like Proove earlier and an article like this took so long to shine the light on Proove. The points raised in this and the other STAT articles are only about a tenth of the wrongdoing at Proove. The place was terribly dysfunctional.
To describe Mr Meshkin as an incompetent CEO will not do justice to the level of incompetence at this company. He is very self righteous and not very bright. He made poor decisions in hiring, promotions and in management. Serious ethical violations were so commonplace that one wonders if the products were for dogs and not human beings. Infighting, backstabbing and lack of communication between teams put the company almost in a perpetual state of near anarchy.
Mr Meshkin’s greed was on the verge of kleptomania. I hope the Feds put him where he belongs: Prison
It is the American way to turn a public health crisis into a marketing opportunity. The Opiate Epidemic, started with marketing opiates, and up selling Oxycontin Presently, they are still quibbling over what do do. We knew about all of this years ago, but the Pharmaceutical Industry paid off the regulators.
Now the fear of Opiates are used to sell everything from pseudo scientific cures, dangerous steroid shots, other dangerous pharmaceuticals (Those are left out of autopsy reports, instead the deaths are attributed to opiates.) It has been years now and this country is still in denial. The media spreads a version of fear, ignorance or false pity. Nearly every news article is misinformation.
The Opiate Epidemic is a marketing tool, nothing more. No one ask why this was not dealt with in year one! It has been profitable, and the dead are disposable anyway. They deliberate conflated chronic pain with addiction, it opened the door for even more unscientific nonsense.
, while companies like Facebook, harvested and sold the data. Desperate sick people are a marketing opportunity, they will buy anything. We don’t need to get to the root of the matter, or fix it, that might cut into profits.