Myriad may somewhat be a familiar name and if you don’t know who the company is think about the HER breast cancer gene test, that’s the company and now they have come out with a genetics based test to help determine the risk of recurrence with prostate cancer. The company plans on educating physicians and urologists 
in the coming weeks. There’s no word yet on whether or not it may or may not be covered by insurance. Recently patients have been scrutinized quite thoroughly for the HER test for breast cancer with additional stipulations required for women to under go the test which is around $3000.00. No word on what the Prolaris test would cost.
The Genomic Test for BRACAnalysis (Breast Cancer) To Be Scrutinized by United Health Care
Also this week there have been many announcements about the early detection of prostate cancer and screenings. The American Cancer Society has put out a pretty long web page with their recommendations and all kinds of additional information to read up. The American Cancer Society supports legislation assuring that men will receive insurance coverage for prostate screening exams. BD
Myriad's Prolaris is a molecular diagnostic assay that offers urologists a more accurate way of determining a prostate cancer patient's risk of recurrence. The new molecular diagnostic test is based on cell growth and tumor biology and provides rigorous, quantitative measures of the expression levels of multiple genes related to progression of the cell cycle.
Myriad Genetics has launched a 46-gene prognostic test Prolaris which quantitatively determines the risk of recurrence in patients who have undergone prostatectomy surgery.
The test identifies patients at low risk of disease recurrence with 95% certainty giving these men confidence that additional treatment with the accompanying toxicity and adverse events is likely unwarranted. Conversely, men with high Prolaris scores would be considered for more intensive screening and adjuvant therapy to address their more aggressive disease.
Myriad Genetics has been performing additional clinical validation studies to expand the utility of Prolaris. In one such recently completed study of 365 prostate cancer patients, 98.5% of prostate cancer patients with a low (favorable) Prolaris score survived their disease after 10 years, compared to 57.6% of the patients receiving a high (unfavorable) score who died of prostate cancer within 10 years.
Myriad said that it would introduce Prolaris to urologists and oncologists through its oncology sales force and new urology sales team in the coming weeks.
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