Castle Biosciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: CSTL), a company improving health through innovative tests that guide patient care, today announced new data showing DecisionDx®-Melanoma can improve risk stratification over American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) staging alone in patients with stage I cutaneous melanoma (CM). DecisionDx-Melanoma uses a patient’s tumor biology to provide the patient’s personalized risk of recurrence and metastasis, while AJCC staging is based on the clinical and pathologic risk factors of a patient’s melanoma tumor.
“As the study showed, DecisionDx-Melanoma provides more precise risk stratification over staging alone to better predict which patients have a low risk of experiencing a poor outcome and those with more aggressive tumor biology who may benefit from increased clinical surveillance.”
“Patients with stage I cutaneous melanoma are considered to have a lower risk of recurrence and melanoma-specific mortality; however, due to the large number of patients diagnosed with stage I disease, this patient group accounts for the largest number of deaths from melanoma,” said Sebastian Podlipnik, M.D., Department of Dermatology, Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, Spain. “As the study showed, DecisionDx-Melanoma provides more precise risk stratification over staging alone to better predict which patients have a low risk of experiencing a poor outcome and those with more aggressive tumor biology who may benefit from increased clinical surveillance.”
The data were presented at the 19th European Association of Dermato-Oncology (EADO) Congress, held in Rome, Italy, in a poster titled, “The 31-gene expression profile outperforms AJCC in stratifying risk of recurrence in patients with stage I cutaneous melanoma.” In the study, DecisionDx-Melanoma provided significant and independent risk stratification of patients with stage I CM. Additionally, as reported in the study, the test added valuable prognostic information to AJCC staging to better stratify recurrence-free survival (RFS) and melanoma-specific survival (MSS) among patients with stage I CM.
| RFS | AJCC staging | Risk-stratification according to AJCC staging provided low-risk stage IA vs. high-risk stage IB RFS rates of 93.3% vs. 87.6%. |
| DecisionDx-Melanoma | DecisionDx-Melanoma demonstrated improved risk-stratification of RFS with low-risk Class 1A vs. high-risk Class 2B RFS rates of 97.3% vs. 77.3%. |
| MSS | AJCC staging | Risk-stratification according to AJCC staging provided low-risk stage IA vs. high-risk stage IB MSS rates of 97.6% vs. 97.9%. |
| DecisionDx-Melanoma | DecisionDx-Melanoma demonstrated improved risk-stratification of MSS with low-risk Class 1A vs. high-risk Class 2B MSS rates of 98.0% vs. 92.3%. |
Importantly, the data demonstrate that patients with AJCC stage I CM who had a high-risk (Class 2B) DecisionDx-Melanoma test result were 5.4 times more likely to die from melanoma compared to patients staged as IB according to AJCC staging. The results of the study support the use of DecisionDx-Melanoma to guide better risk-aligned care in patients considered low risk by staging by identifying high-risk patients who may be missed using only AJCC staging criteria.
Source: https://www.businesswire.com/
