Castle Biosciences, Inc shares surged 55% to $20.64 on Friday after Novitas, a regional Medicare administrative contractor, reversed its draft policy that would have denied coverage of Castle's DecisionDx cancer tests for squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) and melanoma.
Novitas stated that its original local coverage determination (LCD) was scheduled to go into effect on July 17, 2023, and now plans to create a new draft LCD for Castle's DecisionDx tests.
Castle, a diagnostics company, also said it will present new data on its gene expression profile (GEP) risk-stratification test for patients with cutaneous SCC, DecisionDx-SCC, and its GEP risk-stratification test for patients with cutaneous melanoma (CM) at the American Head & Neck Society’s (AHNS) 11th International Conference on Head and Neck Cancer, being held July 8 to 12 in Montréal.
The company’s podium presentation on DecisionDx-SCC will share data that it says demonstrates “significantly improved” metastatic risk prediction in patients with SCC of the head and neck, used both independently and in conjunction with American Joint Committee on Cancer 8th edition and Brigham and Women's Hospital staging systems.
“The study data demonstrated that using DecisionDx-SCC test results in combination with these traditional staging approaches can improve prognostic accuracy to help optimize and personalize treatment choices based on a patient's unique, biological risk profile,” Medical University of South Carolina’s Dr. Jason Newman said in a statement.
DecisionDx-SCC is a 40-gene expression profile test that uses an individual patient’s tumor biology to predict individual risk of cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma metastasis for patients with one or more risk factors, according to the company.
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