The cancer detection firm Elypta announced today that two abstracts using its novel metabolism-based liquid biopsy will be presented at the 2021 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, held virtually from June 4-8, 2021.
Results highlight that Elypta’s new class of metabolic biomarkers, GAGomes (the full profile of free glycosaminoglycans), can detect a third of all stage I/low-grade tumors across cancer, including for example genitourinary or brain tumors. The validated sensitivity to stage I/low-grade cancers was 31% in plasma and 33% in urine with a false positive rate of 2%. The study, conducted in collaboration with the Chalmers University of Technology, included over 1500 samples across 14 types of cancer, across all stages and healthy controls.
“We were curious to see how GAGomes behaved across several types of cancer. So far, we have had data only in renal cell carcinoma. We discovered that several GAGome features in plasma and urine were altered across cancers compared to normal, healthy levels – even in early-stage cancers. This finding remains to be verified in other populations, but the size of this study gives us confidence in the potential of GAGomes as multicancer biomarkers,” says lead researcher Siniša Bratulić from the Division of Systems and Synthetic Biology at the Chalmers University of Technology.
“The study points to the benefits of looking beyond genomic and proteomic biomarkers to deliver on the promise of early cancer detection. It appears that about a third of all cancers activate very early on a metabolic program that severely affects the normal level of GAGomes – both in plasma and urine. This is the crucial observation that allowed us to develop a multicancer early detection test as part of this study. The most exciting aspect is that this test seems to detect cancer types with few good options for early diagnoses, like brain tumors, and critically, at a stage when treatment is likely to result in better outcomes for patients,” says Elypta CSO and co-founder Francesco Gatto. “We are now working to pilot our test in prospective studies for multicancer early detection”.
Another study to be presented at ASCO shows the performance of GAGomes to predict and monitor response to treatment in metastatic renal cell carcinoma. No liquid biomarkers are approved for this use today.
The following are details of the abstract sessions, which are also available at www.asco.org
Detection of any-stage cancer using plasma and urine glycosaminoglycans.
Abstract #3034. Poster Session: Developmental Therapeutics—Molecularly Targeted Agents and Tumor Biology.
Plasma and urine free glycosaminoglycans as monitoring and predictive biomarkers in metastatic renal cell carcinoma: A prospective observational study.
Abstract #e16540. Publication only track: Genitourinary Cancer—Kidney and Bladder
