Combinatorial Pharmacogenomics Testing in Treatment-Naïve Major Depressive Disorder

Major Depressive Disorder is a chronic psychiatric illness that leads to devastating consequences at the individual and societal levels. Today, the choice of treatment continues to be largely based on subjective factors, primarily the clinician and/or patient's preferences, as well as the individual's history of response to treatment, often tainted by recall bias. Psychiatric medication decisions are even more arbitrary when the subject in question has not had past treatment trials. This often leads to a trial and error process and an increasingly resistant disease with each failed trial. Early implementation of an objective tool designed for tailoring medication choice to an individual may prove highly beneficial in decreasing illness chronicity, individual suffering, and economic burden. GeneSight Psychotropic test is a pharmacogenomic decision support tool, developed to help clinicians make informed, evidence-based decisions about proper drug selection. Therefore, we propose conducting a randomized, double blind, controlled trial to evaluate the impact of the GeneSight Psychotropic test to guide treatment decisions in patients with treatment-naïve (never having taken medication for depression) Major Depressive Disorder. This study will involve 6 visits over about 24 weeks where participants will be randomized to have their study clinician have access to their pharmacogenetic report in order to make treatment decisions, or to not have access to their report for the first 12 weeks. At Visit 5, Week 12, all participants will receive a copy of their pharmacogenetics report and all clinicians will be unblinded to be able to use the results to guide treatment options for an additional 12 weeks.