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Testing for Addiction Risk

Proove Biosciences hopes that its suite of tests can help stem the tide of opioid addiction in the US, CNBC reports.

Opioid addiction — some 78 people die each day in the US of an opioid overdose —often starts with a prescription, CNBC says, noting that 100 million people in the US suffer from chronic pain. When doctors assess patients' pain, they typically have them rate it on a scale of one to 10 or using happy and sad faces. But, orthopedic surgeon Karim Abdollahi notes that this is a subjective measure.

Instead, with its genetic test, Proove aims to gauge patients' pain tolerance, drug metabolism, and identified those at risk for opioid dependence, CNBC reports. "Knowing what kind of genetic makeup a patient has before we start giving them medications would go a long way to prevent opioid addiction," Abdollahi tells CNBC. He adds that he's been using it in his own practice.

CNBC adds that Proove is still seeking FDA clearance for some of its tests.

Further, GenomeWeb has reported that some experts are concerned about the tests, as some of the research they draw upon isn't yet ready for the clinic. "I think that most people would not say that we are ready to move into the clinical world based on the currently available published literature," Joel Gelernter from Yale University School of Medicine told GenomeWeb in July.