Castle Biosciences Announces Publication of Study Demonstrating the Integration of DecisionDx®-Melanoma and Clinicopathologic Factors Provides Optimized, Personalized Survival Prognoses for Patients with Cutaneous Melanoma

FRIENDSWOOD, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 23, 2022--

Castle Biosciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: CSTL), a company improving health through innovative tests that guide patient care, today announced the publication of a study in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology validating the performance of DecisionDx ® -Melanoma’s proprietary algorithm, i31-ROR. i31-ROR is designed to integrate a patient’s tumor biology with clinicopathologic factors to provide the patient’s personalized risk of melanoma recurrence. The study, accessible here, found that DecisionDx-Melanoma’s integrated algorithms (i31-ROR and i31-SLNB) provide more precise risk-stratification and individualized risk estimates, compared to those based on clinicopathologic factors alone, and can ultimately improve treatment decisions.

As expected in the study, the most significant factor in predicting melanoma-specific survival (MSS) was the tumor biology risk as identified by DecisionDx-Melanoma’s 31-gene expression profile (GEP) (multivariate hazard ratio (HR)=20.00). Additionally, DecisionDx-Melanoma, including both algorithms (i31-SLNB and i31-ROR), identified 44% of patients who could potentially forego the sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) surgical procedure while maintaining high survival rates (>98% for recurrence-free survival (RFS), distant metastasis-free survival (DMFS) and MSS) or were re-stratified as being at a higher or lower risk of recurrence or death than initially staged using the American Joint Committee on Cancer 8 th edition (AJCC8) staging criteria.

“Current staging practices use key characteristics of a patient’s melanoma tumor to determine how aggressive it is as a means to inform important cancer management decisions, such as intensity of follow-up, surveillance imaging and the need for adjuvant therapy,” said first author Abel Jarell, M.D., dermatologist and dermatopathologist at Northeast Dermatology Associates, PC, Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “DecisionDx-Melanoma takes many of these same characteristics and combines them with the biology of a patient’s tumor to provide patients and clinicians with personalized – instead of population-based – risk estimates that can allow for tailored treatment plans aligned to the patient’s individual risk.”