NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – XDx today said that Aetna has determined that the firm's AlloMap test is medically necessary for monitoring rejection in heart transplant recipients more than a year after a heart transplant.
"Recognition of AlloMap's benefit for eligible heart transplant recipients by one of the leading providers of health care in the United States is an important validation of our tests and results," Pierre Cassigneul, president and CEO of Brisbane, Calif.-based XDx, said in a statement. "We hope to reduce the number of invasive biopsies that stable patients have to undergo post-transplant and thereby improve patients' quality of life."
XDx received US Food and Drug Administration clearance for AlloMap in 2008. The test is a non-invasive, multi-gene expression assay used to aid in the identification of heart transplant recipients with stable allograft function who have a low probability of moderate/severe acute cellular rejection at the time of testing in conjunction with a standard clinical assessment.