McKesson Advances Personalized Medicine Strategy with Proventys Agreement

Predictive risk assessment technologies provide clinical decision
support for individualized care
ATLANTA--(Business Wire)--
McKesson today announced a strategic relationship with Proventys,
Inc., a personalized medicine knowledge service provider that utilizes
cutting-edge predictive modeling to enable personalized clinical
decisions at the point of care. Personalized medicine integrates
genetic and other individual risk factors to enable prediction and
therefore prevention of disease and adverse responses to medications
and other therapies. McKesson plans to incorporate Proventys' risk
prediction capabilities into the core clinical decision support
solutions.

Founded by prospective medicine luminary and Duke University
Chancellor Emeritus Ralph Snyderman, M.D., Proventys translates
predictive data from traditional and emerging diagnostic tests,
including genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, into clinical
decision support solutions.

"As a leader in the transformation of healthcare, McKesson is
innovating now for the way medicine will be practiced in the very near
future," said Michael E. Myers, McKesson's senior vice president and
general manager of Life Sciences. "This agreement is an important
element of our overall strategy to offer vital new capabilities for
personalized clinical decision making. Our goal is to use technology
to support patient involvement in their individualized, prospective
health planning. The unparalleled knowledge base from Proventys will
be an important contribution to our Horizon Knowledge Center(TM)
clinical content offering."

Dr. Snyderman, chairman of Proventys, has played a leading role in
the emerging healthcare paradigm known as prospective medicine, which
focuses on personalized risk prediction in order to prevent disease,
versus waiting for disease to occur and then treating it, often in its
acute or chronic stages.

"Chronic disease degrades the quality of life and longevity for a
vast and increasing number of people," Snyderman explained.
"Inefficient spending on the acute treatment of chronic disease has
exploded in the United States and accounts for nearly three-quarters
of all healthcare expenses. "Until recently, our best preventative or
therapeutic attempts were based on general patient variables, or on
one-size-fits-all treatment regimens. Proventys is leading the
industry toward a new individualized approach to healthcare by
integrating the latest advances in using risk factors derived from
clinical research data and biomarkers with state-of-the-art
bioinformatics technologies to develop personalized clinical
predictive models to thereby inform better clinical decisions."

Dr. Snyderman is the recipient of the 2007 "Leadership in
Personalized Medicine" award from the Personalized Medicine Coalition
(PMC) for his efforts in advancing predictive and targeted therapies
on a national scale. During his 15 years as Duke's Chancellor for
Health Affairs and Dean of the School of Medicine, Dr. Snyderman
oversaw the development of the Duke University Health System, one of
the nation's most successful integrated academic health systems and
served as its first president and chief executive officer.

"The work we will do together will help to define a new healthcare
delivery system focused on supporting the next generation of
medicine," said Pamela Pure, president of McKesson Technology
Solutions. "Physicians already struggle to make effective, informed,
efficient care decisions based on the numerous patient variables they
must consider when providing treatment. As those variables increase
exponentially over the next few years, physicians will require
increasingly sophisticated clinical decision support tools to help
them. Through our personalized medicine strategy, McKesson is well
positioned to lead the industry in developing these next generation
capabilities."

About McKesson

McKesson Corporation, currently ranked 18th on the FORTUNE 500, is
a healthcare services and healthcare information technology company
dedicated to helping its customers deliver high-quality healthcare by
reducing costs, streamlining processes, and improving the quality and
safety of patient care. McKesson is the longest-operating company in
healthcare today, marking its 175th anniversary this year. Over the
course of its history, McKesson has grown by providing pharmaceutical
and medical-surgical supply management across the spectrum of care;
healthcare information technology for hospitals, physicians, homecare
and payors; hospital and retail pharmacy automation; and services for
manufacturers and payors designed to improve outcomes for patients.
For more information, visit http://www.mckesson.com.

About Proventys

Proventys, Inc. is a personalized medicine knowledge service
provider focused on delivering cutting-edge risk prediction technology
to power personalized clinical decisions at the point of care. Through
its proprietary risk assessment architecture, the company is able to
harness the power of clinical data along with emerging diagnostic
tests, including biomarkers from the fields of genomics, proteomics,
and metabolomics, to power personalized medicine at the point of care.
This breakthrough enables clinicians to select more effective,
targeted approaches to improve clinical and economic outcomes for each
individual patient. Founded in 2004 by Ralph Snyderman, M.D.,
Chancellor Emeritus of Duke University, Proventys is located in
Durham, North Carolina. For more information, visit www.proventys.com.

McKesson
Connie Crumbley, 404-338-3828

Copyright Business Wire 2008