Castle Biosciences, a company improving health through innovative tests that guide patient care, has announced a new study published in The American Journal of Gastroenterology showing how use of TissueCypher Barrett’s oesophagus test results can significantly improve management decisions for Barrett’s oesophagus (BE; pictured)) patients with low-grade dysplasia (LGD) to improve health outcomes.
“A significant challenge in the clinical management of Barrett’s oesophagus is the inconsistency in diagnoses, and thus patient management, when relying solely on pathology review of biopsied tissue,” said leading BE expert Dr Jacques Bergman, study author, and Professor of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy at the University of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam University Medical Center. “As demonstrated in this study, TissueCypher test results offer a tool that may alleviate this challenge by providing objective and actionable risk stratification that can improve patient care decisions, including the upstaging of care for high-risk patients and the downstaging of care for patients who are at low risk for progression to more advanced dysplasia or oesophageal cancer.”
The study involved a cohort of 154 real patients with community-based LGD and known progression/non-progression outcomes who were followed prospectively as part of the Surveillance versus Radiofrequency Ablation (SURF) trial. Management decision simulations were performed to determine the most likely care plan with or without use of TissueCypher, where each patient’s specimens were reviewed by 30 pathologists, leading to confirmation of dysplasia or downstaging to non-dysplastic Barrett’s oesophagus (NDBE) or indefinite for dysplasia (IND).
Overall, the study results suggest that TissueCypher may be used to standardise the management of BE patients with NDBE, IND and LGD. Broad use of TissueCypher test results should improve BE health outcomes by increasing the early detection of patients at a high risk of progression who can receive therapeutic interventions or close surveillance, both of which are effective strategies to reduce the incidence and mortality of oesophageal adenocarcinoma. Use of the TissueCypher test may also improve health outcomes by identifying patients at a low risk of progression who can avoid unnecessary therapy and be managed using surveillance alone.
The full study is available here.