RE: Looking forward......18 Oct 2023 14:18
Broker Update Part 1
OBD/BUPA partnership for CiRT: OBD has announced this morning that the UK health insurer BUPA will offer OBD’s immunotherapy susceptibility test (EpiSwitch CiRT) to cancer patients who are being considered for treatment with a checkpoint inhibitor. We believe that this partnership represents another important commercial validation of the potential of the CiRT test to identify those patients most likely to benefit from checkpoint inhibitor treatment. While the availability of the checkpoint inhibitor class has transformed the outlook for many cancer patients, offering the prospect of durable responses, efforts are ongoing to ensure that only patients who benefit receive treatment. Previously, the only predictive biomarkers approved for clinical use have been PD-L1 expression, tumour mismatch repair deficiency and high tumour mutational burden. However, their utility has been hampered by the lack of a standardised threshold and do not correlate well with response rates. We have previously highlighted the very real issue where, for example, patients with apparently low PD-L1 levels still respond to anti PD-L1 therapy, while many patients with tumours which have high PD-L1 expression levels, may not respond to PD-L1 or PD1 inhibition. Clearly, there is a need for a more accurate test to provide expected efficacy in individual cancer patients. OBD’s EPISwitch CiRT test has the potential to be an important contributor, offering a potent mix of best-in-class predictive performance combining high sensitivity (93%), specificity (82%) and accuracy (85%) across 15 cancer types, without the need for invasive biopsies.
Sign In
Follow the stocks
