On June 3, 2021, the Holmusk Data Science team presented a poster about their work on factors affecting the treatment retention of the drug Buprenorphine (BUP) in patients diagnosed with Opioid use disorder (OUD) at the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) 2021 Annual Meeting.

The study utilized anonymized electronic health data available in the NeuroBlu platform and was done in collaboration with psychiatrists from JPS Health. The final study cohort consisted of more than 5000 patients diagnosed with OUD and survival (time-to-event) analysis was used to examine the effect of different clinical, sociodemographic, concurrent SUD conditions and overall disorder severity as measured in the Clinical Global Impression -Severity (CGI-S) on treatment dropouts.

The study found that the treatment retention is extremely poor with BUP treatment of OUD and those with greater OUD severity and comorbid cannabis use disorder at treatment initiation have a higher propensity of premature treatment discontinuation. In addition, the study found that an initial dosing of 8 mg/day appears to be the best course of treatment for patients suffering from OUD.

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