On October 19, 2022 SeekIn Inc, a leader in blood-based cancer early detection and monitoring technology, reported the results of pan-cancer early detection test SeekInCare were presented at The 2022 Early Detection of Cancer Conference in Portland, Oregon (Press release, SeekIn, OCT 19, 2022, View Source [SID1234622204]).

Schedule your 30 min Free 1stOncology Demo!
Discover why more than 1,500 members use 1stOncology™ to excel in:

Early/Late Stage Pipeline Development - Target Scouting - Clinical Biomarkers - Indication Selection & Expansion - BD&L Contacts - Conference Reports - Combinatorial Drug Settings - Companion Diagnostics - Drug Repositioning - First-in-class Analysis - Competitive Analysis - Deals & Licensing

                  Schedule Your 30 min Free Demo!

At present, the majority of deadly cancers do not have standard-of-care screening paradigms available and the existing screenings have challenges in patient compliance due to the invasive procedures endured from the tests. As a result, most cancers are detected until they have progressed to late stages when chances of survival are much lower.

"Currently, the five-year survival rate for cancer patients in China is 39%, compared with 68% in the United States. The key to the difference in the survival rates between China and the United States is cancer screening, which reduces disease- and treatment-related morbidity, increases the likelihood of treatment success, improves quality of life, and reduces treatment cost and complexity," said Mao Mao, M.D., Ph.D., SeekIn’s founder and CEO. "SeekInCare, a blood-based pan-cancer detection approach, holds promise for identifying asymptomatic cancer patients from general population through a single blood draw."

SeekInCare, a novel multidimensional cancer risk score (CRS) model, incorporating copy number aberrations (CNA), fragment size (FS), end motifs and cancer related viruses via shallow whole genome sequencing (sWGS) from cell-free DNA (cfDNA), and seven plasma tumor markers (PTMs). The case-control study included 616 stage I-IV cancer patients that cover 8 common cancers and 19 other types, and 898 healthy subjects. SeekInCare identified 419 cancer patients with 68.0% sensitivity at 98.0% specificity, resulting in an AUC (area under the curve) of 0.916. Compared with multi-cancer detection in the retrospective validation cohorts from GRAIL and Exact Sciences, SeekInCare had a similar performance if not better. Moreover, the sensitivities were 49.0%, 61.3%, 72.5% and 85.4% in stages I, II, III and IV respectively.

To further assess SeekInCare’s performance, it was evaluated in a real-world cohort consisting of 604 subjects (median follow-up time: 404 days). 12 cancer cases were detected while nine subjects tested positive but without cancer. Only one subject was tested negative and subsequently diagnosed with stage I thyroid cancer. Thus, SeekInCare achieved 92.3% sensitivity, 97.7% specificity, 57.1% PPV and 99.7% NPV in the real-world cohort. These data demonstrated that the performance of SeekInCare is similar to the data generated by GRAIL and Johns Hopkins University in prospective setting.

"There are different technical approaches for blood-based pan-cancer/multi-cancer early detection. These clinical studies demonstrated the solid performance of our technology," said Dr. Mao, "In addition, SeekInCare had received CE-IVD Mark approval which represents a significant milestone for SeekIn in bringing SeekInCare test to the other countries besides China, allowing more people to access the cutting-edge, convenient, non-invasive and cost-effective cancer early detection technology."