57% correlation for Epigenomics' cancer test

Epigenomics AG, a Germany-based molecular diagnostics company, says that new data show that its technique of screening for methylated DNA in the blood is key to detecting early colorectal cancer.

According to its findings, presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research, held in Washigton DC, the presence of a methylation DNA biomarker encoding the Septin 9 gene is found in plasma of up to 57% of patients with all stages of colorectal cancer at high levels of specificity (95%).

The German firm says that, after validating the Septin 9 assay in a set of several hundred samples, researchers predicted the diagnosis of colorectal cancer in an independent set of 790 patients. In this study, the detection rate for all colorectal cancers was 50%, while the false positive rate for both studies was between 4%-6%.