Patent ID: 8718946

Claim:
A method of evaluating the efficacy of a therapeutic agent on an inflammatory condition, the method comprising: a) producing a first index for a sample from a subject, the sample providing a source of RNAs comprising: i) quantitatively measuring the amount of RNA from the sample from the subject by amplification, wherein a panel of constituents is selected so that measurement conditions of the constituents enables evaluation of said inflammatory condition and wherein the measures of all constituents in the panel form a first profile data set, wherein said amplification for each constituent is under conditions that are (1) within a degree of repeatability of better than five percent; and (2) the efficiencies of amplification are within two percent, ii) inserting the values from a first profile data set into an index function derived using latent class modeling, thereby providing a single-valued measure of the inflammatory condition so as to produce an index pertinent to the inflammatory condition of the subject, wherein the first profile data set is derived from quantitatively measuring the amount of RNA of all constituents in said panel from a sample of a plurality of subjects of a relevant population and which measurements form a normative baseline profile data set; iii) inserting the values from the normative profile data set into the index function, thereby providing a single-valued measure of the inflammatory condition so as to produce an index pertinent to the inflammatory condition of the relevant population, iv) producing an index of the subject; v) normalizing the index of the subject with the index of the relevant population to provide the first index; and (b) evaluating the efficacy of the agent based on a value of the first index prior to treatment and comparing to the value of the first index after treatment, wherein the first index is greater than 1 prior to treatment and the first index after treatment is less that 1 when treatment is efficacious.