Veracyte, Inc. announced that data published on September 22, 2022, in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute demonstrate that the company’s Decipher Prostate Genomic Classifier may help identify African American men with early, localized prostate cancer who are most likely to harbor more aggressive disease.
The data, from the prospective, multi-site VANDAAM Phase 2 clinical study, suggest that the genomic test may offer a robust improvement over clinical factors alone in risk-stratifying prostate cancer among African American men, which may help reduce disparities in prostate cancer outcomes.
The Decipher Prostate Genomic Classifier is a 22-gene prognostic biomarker that provides a low, intermediate or high score indicating the aggressiveness of an individual patient’s cancer, to help healthcare professionals more accurately categorize risk and select appropriate treatment.
The VANDAAM trial enrolled men with low- or intermediate-risk prostate cancer as classified by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Guidelines for Prostate Cancer. For the current analysis, researchers identified a clinically balanced cohort of 226 men (113 African American men and 113 non-African American men) from the study and performed genomic analysis using the Decipher Prostate classifier to generate Decipher risk scores.
Results show that a higher proportion of African American men with NCCN low and favorable intermediate risk prostate cancer (18% and 37.8%, respectively) had higher Decipher scores as compared to non-African American men. Men who self-identified as African American were more than twice as likely as non-African American men to have their cancer re-classified from NCCN low or intermediate risk based on a high Decipher score (known as genomic risk of reclassification or GrR; relative risk = 2.23; 95% CI). In addition, the data show that younger African American men had higher Decipher scores, whereas in non-African American men, higher risk of metastasis scores were observed in older men.
