NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – California's Medicaid program has begun covering XDx's molecular diagnostic test for heart transplant rejection, the Brisbane, Calif.-based firm announced today.
Medi-Cal has added XDx's test called AlloMap as a new, covered benefit for the monitoring of heart transplants for organ rejection. AlloMap is now covered by more than 200 insurers in the US, and more than 80 percent of tests performed during the past year have been reimbursed, XDx said.
About 2,100 heart transplants are performed each year in the US, XDx noted.
AlloMap measures the expression levels of a set of genes from a blood sample, providing clinicians a tool for evaluating a patient's risk for a transplant rejection. The company launched the test in 2005, and three years later the US Food and Drug Administration approved AlloMap.
"The value of AlloMap consists of its ability to non-invasively determine whether a heart transplant recipient has a low probability of rejection," Mario Deng, medical director of Heart Transplantation at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, said in a statement. "Utilization of AlloMap can avoid many invasive biopsies, greatly contributing to patients' quality of life."
XDx secured a $15 million senior credit facility in September with plans to develop new applications using its molecular expression technology.