
Make an appointment today to discover how our expertise in practice branding, patient acquisition, advanced marketing tactics, and patient retention can help you thrive.

Steve Schwartz reveals secrets to successful marketing campaigns and growth strategies for the concierge medical industry, this guide draws from 25 years of digital marketing expertise and experience working with over 900 clients.

Contact Dr. Mellios
By Phone: (505) 542-4060
Website: circulargenomics.com
In this episode of the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast, host Steven Schwartz speaks with Dr. Nikolaos Mellios, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Circular Genomics. They discuss the innovative blood test MindLight, which predicts patient response to SSRI antidepressants, aiming to improve treatment outcomes in mental health. Dr. Mellios shares insights on the accuracy and clinical utility of MindLight compared to existing pharmacogenomic tests, emphasizing the importance of precision medicine in psychiatry. The conversation also highlights the growing awareness of mental health issues and the need for effective treatment options.
Steven Schwartz (00:00)
Welcome to the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast, the show dedicated to helping concierge medical practices grow and thrive. Hosted by Steven Schwartz, a digital marketing expert with over 25 years of experience and a passion for improving American healthcare by helping concierge medical physicians succeed. Here’s Steven Schwartz.
Steven Schwartz (00:25)
Hello and welcome to the concierge medical marketing podcast. I’m your host, Steve Schwartz, and it’s my pleasure to have you along on our discussion today. We have a really great plan for today with Dr. Nikolaos Mellios, he asked me to call him Nico. Nico, thank you for being with me here today.
Nikolas Mellios (00:44)
Thanks Steve for the invitation, I’m looking forward to this.
Steven Schwartz (00:48)
Wonderful. Thank you. And your company is Circular Genomics. We’re going to get into that in just a moment. But before we do, please give us a quick background your history, your schooling, and what brought you to Circular Genomics.
Nikolas Mellios (01:03)
So I was originally trained as a physician 20 years ago in Greece as you can understand from my accent But I was very disappointed early on by the lack of choices for precision medicine in psychiatry and neurology, right? with treatment options and also in neurology difficulty with actually having disease modifying treatment. So to do some training in biology and neuroscientists initially at UMass Medical School
where I got excited about RNA and not counting RNAs. And later on at MIT where I focused on preclinical models and new treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders. And I have been in the company as a co-founder and chief scientific officer four years ago. And I’m happy to tell you more about progress that we have.
Steven Schwartz (01:52)
Excellent. And right now you’re located in New Mexico, but I understand the company is going to be moving soon.
Nikolas Mellios (01:59)
Yes, as part of a strategic partnership that we will announce soon, we’ll be moving our laboratory in San Diego and soon our headquarters to San Diego.
Steven Schwartz (02:09)
Nice. I actually grew up in Southern California myself, the town of San Pedro. so I love getting back to California for a visit and seeing some friends, enjoying the sites and obviously catching my favorite restaurants while I’m there. So, but you’re going to love San Diego. It’s a great, great area. getting into our discussion today, your company offers MindLight. Now, again, I’m not a physician. I’m a digital marketing expert, but the way I understand MindLight,
is that it’s a blood test which helps physicians with patients exhibiting depression to see if they’re going to respond to the SSRI antidepressants. Could you give us a little more detail and make sure I said that right?
Nikolas Mellios (02:55)
Yeah, that’s exactly right. So MindLight is actually the first ever blood assay to directly predict response to the SSRI class of antidepressants. We’ll talk a little bit later how the current standard of care is really unacceptable. It relies on trial and error. And we don’t really provide physicians with the proper tools to decide which medication, which antidepressant would be the most efficacious for which patient. So that’s what we’re doing with MindLight.
We are predicting before treatment the likelihood of a patient to respond and improve with SSRI class of antidepressants.
Steven Schwartz (03:34)
Love it. That’s so helpful. And again, I’m not a medical person, but the way I understand it is that and similar types of medications are somewhat of a trial and error. The physician says, Hey, let’s put you on this medication. It may help. It may not, but let’s give it a try. And that trial could be six months, nine months, a year. over the course of that time period, the medication literally might not make a difference.
and your test, MindLight, can help identify which patients these medicines are going to help before they start the process of taking the medication, correct?
Nikolas Mellios (04:17)
Exactly. So as you know, there are a lot of different antidepressants that have shown clinical efficacy. work, right? So antidepressants work. The problem is different classes of antidepressants work on different patients, right? So SSRIs are the first class of treatment, the most commonly prescribed antidepressants where someone is first diagnosed with the disease, but they only work between 40 and 50 percent of the patients. So you understand that the majority of the patients will wait for six months to a year.
They might have to adjust the dose and eventually they will realize it’s not working. Another issue with antidepressants is that it takes some weeks for the patient and the physician to realize that they’re working. So unlike the side effects that will appear early on and then will reduce and dissipate treatment, they’re that are quite safe and lot of patients tolerate them, but there will be initially side effects, but the improvement will lag for weeks.
So this is where the patient have doubt whether the treatment is going to work. But having before treatment, an assay that tells you that with high likelihood this person is going to benefit from the drug, can guide treatment options for physicians, and also give the patient some assurance to be patient and be compliant for the personalized treatment that was chosen by their physician.
Steven Schwartz (05:36)
I love it. So what is the accuracy and the clinical utility of mind light? How accurate?
Nikolas Mellios (05:42)
Exactly. So
on average, the accuracy around 80 % with similar positive and negative predictive value. of course, we are improving our performance and accuracy. We also realize, you know, we have to compare that with the standard that are available to physicians. So right now, again, will go from 40 % likelihood of response. If you take our assay and you are as a high likelihood to respond patient,
that will jump to 80%, so two-fold improvement in the likelihood. And then for those that we predict as non-responders, they will have a 60 % chance of actually failing the drug. We can identify them a priori and save the physician and the patient this six months to one year, and they can be guided to a second line of treatment earlier. So that’s a significant improvement in the current standard of care. We think actually can revolutionize how physicians approach treatment for depression.
Steven Schwartz (06:37)
Right now, I understand there are other products or systems available on the market. PGX, I believe, is one of them. you tell us a little bit about other products briefly that are in the same space and why you feel is a better option or more accurate?
Nikolas Mellios (06:58)
So the only assays that are available right now for guiding treatment options for depression are the pharmacogenomics, the PGX assay. So what they do is they look into the patient’s DNA and they try to see are there any rare mutations that will affect how the liver metabolizes different drugs. But what we know from significant literature and a lot of clinical studies that have done on pharmacogenomics is that at best these predictions are useful for predicting
perhaps side effects profile of drugs and tolerability. Can the patient metabolize and tolerate? For a significant number of literature suggest that these predictions lack clinical utility. They are not able to directly predict response, right? I can metabolize a drug normally, but that doesn’t mean in my brain it will induce the specific response. And that doesn’t mean that my brain is actually lacking the specific component that this drug normalizes. So,
And this is not again, this is not our opinion. The FDA has issued twice a warning for Pgx use for antidepressant treatment prediction because they lack clinical utility and efficacy. And then the American Psychiatric Association has echoed that feeling and they reviewed the clinical studies and they found that again, there were some clinical studies that failed to show clinical utility. Then they unblinded the consequent studies and found some small improvements, but the American Psychiatric Association does not believe.
These results support clinical utility. And lastly, as of a few days ago, one of the major insurers decided to drop insurance coverage for PGX the beginning of the next year. So you can understand there’s significant limitations for PGX. then having said that, in combination with our assay that does this direct prediction of response, we believe PGX will have a synergistic effect into providing
additional information to the physician about tolerability and side effect profiling. But again, the Arrasa is the only one right now in the market that can directly predict the response to antidepressants.
Steven Schwartz (09:07)
Boy, what a wonderful position for your company to be in with such an important service that you’re providing and the fact that really there’s nothing else that compares to it. me ask you this. How do best see our audience members who are primarily physicians or direct primary care doctors small to medium sized clinics? can they best connect with your company
to utilize mind light with their patients. What’s the process?
Nikolas Mellios (09:38)
Yeah, so the best way is to go into our website, circulargenomics.com or go and click MindLight and connect them to our website or they can directly contact me for any further information about our clinical studies, know, any other components for the performance of the assay. So that will be the best way. directly contacting me going into our website or, you know, searching for MindLight antidepressant response test and it will direct them to our sales.
Steven Schwartz (10:07)
Okay, that sounds great. And do practices typically by a certain number of tests or how does that process work?
Nikolas Mellios (10:17)
So is the question if there’s additional tests that we are working on or?
Steven Schwartz (10:21)
No, let me clarify. Let’s say a practice deals with a lot of with depression issues. They have tried the test and they want to be able to use it and essentially have a of these tests available or taking blood and sending it. Exactly. How does the process work kind of in the nitty gritty, please?
Nikolas Mellios (10:42)
Exactly, excellent question. So yeah, once will set up an account with a physician’s office or clinic once the account is set up then we will send kids into the physician’s office. If their clinic does not have the capacity for phlebotomy we can arrange ourselves for mobile phlebotomy or other options. So in which case we will send the kids to the site of phlebotomy. Okay and
So, and as far as the data, then the turnaround time is around five days. So five days after that, the physician will have report in their office clearly stating is the patient high likelihood or low likelihood to respond to SSRIs. And again, for now, this is a direct pay where the has to agree to cover the costs of the assay. But in the future, we’ll be working on insurance coverage in the next few years.
Steven Schwartz (11:33)
Boy, this has been so fascinating and I’ve learned so much. Do you have any final comments that you’d like to share with our audience regarding your system, the business, how they can contact you, anything else you want to add?
Nikolas Mellios (11:45)
Yes, I would like to add a little bit about our clinical studies because I understand people in conscious fields, they’re really into the quality of the science and the clinical studies and they want to when they are adopting cutting-edge So I would like to mention that we were really to work with leading key opinion leaders in psychiatry and we were able to get access to very large, well-characterized clinical samples.
So far we have six different hospital locations including Medical School, UT Southwestern, Columbia University, European locations. So we did a number of clinical validation studies and we did significant analytical validation studies that showed the reproducibility and the robustness of our assay. For me, it’s not just as a former physician and neuroscientist. For me, I’m on a mission to help patients like a lot of other individuals.
I’ve seen in my family the difficulty of having depression and not having the proper treatment. So I would just like to emphasize that this is a significant attention in the quality of the clinical studies, the results, and also additional validation and independent validation studies to be able to know that this is a product that can have a significant impact in the clinic. And the last comment again on concierge, given that they are ahead of the field.
in medicine. We’re also looking forward to getting into discussions with concierge medical systems and getting feedback how the additional components that will benefit them and also of course discussing with them and clarifying the need for having this assay in the markets. And another component to say that we already are discussing with numerous psychiatrists and mental health experts and the significant enthusiasm from
experts on utilizing this assay, it seems for them that this is something that has been actually delayed. They wish they had this product many years ago because as you understand due to the pandemic the prevalence of major depressive disorder has climbed very high. 25 % of adults report having a depression in their lifetime so this is really a very significant urgent component that I’m sure concierge physicians have to deal in a daily basis.
Steven Schwartz (14:03)
Right. I’ve heard a lot of cases related to the pandemic. At least more people are searching mental health counseling or therapies help them with issues like depression, loneliness, related simply from the pandemic, younger people. seems like the trend that I’ve seen, again, non-medical, trend of younger people being much more willing to seek mental health.
counseling to help them through whatever they’re going through. it’s thrilling to see that because, you for me, when I grew up, you know, the idea of, know, if your knee hurt or your elbow or you had a headache, you talk about it. But if it was mental health issues, we don’t talk about that, right? It was kind of hush hush and kept under the rug. And so I’m very grateful the work that you’re doing at your company, as well as many other folks in the industry to help bring mental health.
to the forefront because there’s so many places where things can be improved, but we have to talk about them, right? We have to bring these issues to light so that we can find great solutions and help people have more happy, fulfilled, positive lives and, and, you know, cut down on rates of suicide and drug abuse and other awful things.
Nikolas Mellios (15:05)
Exactly.
And if I may add to this excellent point is the significant progress in reducing the stigma for mental health, including depression. really glad to see that. when you have a patient suffering from depression and they’re being in this very difficult situation, right, for them, with also significant comorbidities and disability, for the physician to disappoint them and give them this trial and error approach, I think this really first reduces credibility.
and physicians then you know will have problem convincing the patient to try another and another treatment. But I also believe that once physicians employ precision medical choices for treatment and once the percentage of individuals that benefit from treatment increases to the 70-80 % that we want to see with our assay, I believe that will also help eliminate the stigma. Because it will be yeah you know I had or another mental health during the summer.
And after a few months now, I’m feeling perfectly fine. So I think it will help a little bit eliminate the stigma by explaining that there are viable options and people can get better as fast as possible.
Steven Schwartz (16:27)
Nico, this has been great. Thank you again for taking the time to speak with me on the podcast today. And I’m very confident that what you’ve told me, your product is going to help many, many patients in the future, the help that they need by knowing if these types of medications are going to help them before they take them and before they, they invest the time and the money. you said, the trust and credibility of their physician in that process.
So I love what you’re doing and I’m so glad had the chance to speak today. attended the Concierge Medical Forum in Cumming, Georgia a few weeks ago and met some members of your team there. And it was so nice to connect with them. And through them, they put me in touch with you in order to for this podcast interview today.
Nikolas Mellios (17:16)
Thank you so much, Stephen. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss with you. And again, thank you for the message to physicians about all the opportunities that exist right now. So again, pleasure to chat with you.
Steven Schwartz (17:25)
Truly,
truly my pleasure. love through this podcast that I get the chance to meet so many interesting people who are doing such amazing work to help elevate medical and healthcare for across our entire country and obviously beyond. part, as I mentioned, I’m not clinical, I’m not a doctor at all, my background is in digital marketing. I actually wrote a book called The Definitive Guide to Winning.
with digital marketing for Concierge medical practices. And book is over 100 pages of actionable information designed specifically to help small to medium-sized practices and DPC practices win and succeed in their practices through effective digital marketing. book is available through our website, conciergemd.marketing. Again, totally free download. Feel free to visit there.
enter your email address in the box and hit the go button. The system should send you an email with a link where you can download the book. Please take it with my compliments. And of course, if there’s anything that anybody in my audience listening to the podcast, any questions you have about growing your practice, my phone number is 772-304-2420. Please give me a call. It’ll be my pleasure to assist in any way that I can. So with all that being said, Nicholas Mellios,
Thank you, Nico, for your time today. I appreciate it so much. We’ll definitely keep an eye on your business into the future and to grow and help lots of people.
Nikolas Mellios (18:56)
Thanks so much Stephen, pleasure to be in your podcast.
Steven Schwartz (18:59)
My pleasure. Have a good day.
Steven Schwartz (19:06)
Thank you for tuning in to the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast. Please subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts and stay connected with us on social media. To speak with Steven Schwartz about growing your Concierge Medical Practice, give him a call at 772-304-2420 or visit our website at conciergemd.marketing. We will see you next time.