FRIENDSWOOD, Texas– Castle Biosciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: CSTL), a company improving health through innovative tests that guide patient care, today announced that it has been selected as the winner of the “Best New Technology Solution – Dermatology” award in the sixth annual MedTech Breakthrough Awards program for its innovative DecisionDx®-Melanoma gene expression profile (GEP) test. DecisionDx-Melanoma leverages Castle’s advanced technologies to identify the risk of metastasis, recurrence and sentinel lymph node (SLN) positivity for patients diagnosed with invasive cutaneous melanoma. In 2021, Castle was awarded “Best New Technology Solution – Oncology” by MedTech Breakthrough for its DecisionDx®-SCC and DecisionDx® DiffDx®-Melanoma GEP tests, both of which were launched in the second half of 2020.
The mission of the MedTech Breakthrough Awards is to honor excellence and recognize the innovation, hard work and success in a range of health and medical technology categories. This year’s program attracted more than 3,900 nominations from over 15 different countries throughout the world.
DecisionDx-Melanoma is Castle’s proprietary risk stratification GEP test that is designed to use a patient’s tumor biology to predict individual risk of metastasis or recurrence for patients diagnosed with invasive cutaneous melanoma, a deadly skin cancer, as well as the risk of SLN positivity, independent of traditional staging factors. Unlike traditional treatment plans that are developed using clinical and pathologic factors alone (e.g., a patient’s age, tumor thickness, ulceration, etc.), incorporating the patient’s primary tissue biology can help physicians and patients make more informed disease management decisions aligned with each patient’s unique biologic risk.
“Having an accurate picture of whether melanoma is likely to recur or spread is critical to making the right treatment and disease management decisions, and though risk indicators like clinicopathological factors and patient history are important, they have their limitations,” said James Johnson, managing director, MedTech Breakthrough. “Genomic testing can supplement these traditional factors, and Castle’s GEP test has been shown to accurately and independently predict individual risk of recurrence or metastasis, and can provide clinically actionable and personalized information to inform the treatment plan for each patient. Congratulations to the Castle team for being our choice for ‘Best New Technology Solution – Dermatology.’”
