San Diego – April 23, 2015—SNP Bio, Inc., a company developing genetic tests for determining risk of serious human diseases, announced today that the abstract, titled “The Prostate Genetic Score (PGS) Stratifies Baseline Risk of Prostate Cancer and Improves PSA Performance in the PLCO Trial”, by Michael Liss, et al. has been selected to be included in the 2015 American Urology Association’s Annual Meeting Press Program. The abstract, coauthored by SNP Bio co-founders A. Karim Kader, M.D., Ph.D., and Jianfeng Xu, M.D., Dr.PH., and with Haitio Chen, is one of only 45 selected from over 2,500 abstracts that were reviewed for presentation to the media.
Presentation:
Press Conference: The Prostate Genetic Score (PGS) Stratifies Baseline Risk of Prostate Cancer and Improves PSA
Performance in the PLCO Trial
Speaker: Michael Liss, M.D., Assistant Professor, University Texas Health Science Center
Time: Monday, May 18, 2015, 9:00 a.m.
SNP Bio’s initial test, PGS-33™ (Prostate Genetic Score), generates a Genetic Risk Score (GRS) for prostate cancer, to assist physicians in determining which men require early, risk-adapted screening. A positive family history of prostate cancer has long been understood to be an important risk factor justifying more active screening, but it is imperfect because it is subjective and often unclear or unknown. Because SNP Bio’s PGS-33 test provides an objective measure of a patient’s genetic risk of developing prostate cancer, it can supplement family history in the screening decision. As such, it can be an essential tool in ensuring that men at high risk will continue to be screened.
L. Blair Shamel, President and CEO of SNP Bio said, “The PGS 33 test represents a major step forward towards defining a man’s lifetime risk for prostate cancer. This well-validated, simple test, performed on a cheek swab sample, at any age, can help identify those high risk men who may benefit most from prostate cancer screening, potentially helping to reverse the trend toward men initially presenting with higher-risk prostate cancer.”
For over 20 years, PSA-based screening programs have been the primary method of identifying men at high risk of harboring prostate cancer. This has resulted in a historic drop in both the incidence of metastatic disease at diagnosis, from 40% in the pre-PSA era to less than 10% today, as well as the related death rate, from 36 per 100,000 men to 21 per 100,000 men1. However, accompanying these positive trends has been an increase in potential over-treatment related to increased diagnosis of low-risk disease and false-positive results from PSA-testing. This led to a 2011 recommendation by the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) against routine PSA-based screening.
The USPSTF recommendation illuminated an unmet medical need regarding prostate cancer screening. In fact, recent studies have begun to show a trend toward an alarming increase in the proportion of men presenting with higher-risk disease2,possibly due to delays in the diagnosis of the disease in unscreened men.
SNP Bio’s PGS-33, which is calculated based on 33 cancer risk-associated SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) has been the subject of multiple peer-reviewed articles demonstrating it can be used independently or in combination with family history to define an individual’s prostate cancer risk and guide the decision of who should receive early and more frequent PSA-based screening. PGS-33 is objective, personalized and does not change over time.
About SNP Bio
SNP Bio was founded to commercialize genetic tests to determine a patient’s risk of developing serious diseases such as cancer. The company’s initial test, the PGS-33™ prostate cancer Genetic Risk Score (GRS), is the first advanced genetic test to predict the lifetime risk of men to develop prostate cancer. The test supplements family history in the decision to offer active, biomarker-based screening. PGS-33 draws upon data from over 87,000 patients, and has been clinically validated in 20,000 patients from the most important prostate cancer detection studies. This Screen Smarter™ approach will allow determination of which men need risk-adapted screening, potentially leading to lower healthcare costs and reduced morbidity. SNP Bio, a privately held company, is based in San Diego, California. For more information, please visit www.snpbio.com.
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