NEW YORK – Shares of California-based diagnostics firm DermTech rose sharply on Monday following the company's announcement that two more payors will offer coverage for its noninvasive skin genomics testing platform.
DermTech's shares were up as much as over 22 percent on Monday on the Nasdaq and ended the day up just shy of 22 percent.
The decisions by a Blue Cross Blue Shield company in Hawaii and a nonprofit health plan in New York will make the DermTech Melanoma Test (DMT) available to an additional 1.2 million people, the firm said, expanding the test's availability to 115 million people in the US.
A company spokesman declined to identify the commercial payors and said the names are being withheld for contractual restrictions or considerations.
The test is now available to 68 million Medicare or Medicare Advantage members and 47 million customers of other commercial or governmental payors.
DermTech officials said earlier this month that the US Defense Health Agency's Lab Joint Working Group had recommended coverage of the foundational assay by the military health system TRICARE, which would make the test available to 9 million uniformed service members.
DermTech said its test platform detects melanoma with a greater than 99 percent negative predictive value. It uses an RT-PCR assay to identify expression of the LINC00518 and PRAME genes, and it can include an add-on assay that identifies the presence of TERT promoter mutations.
On Tuesday, the company's stock was up about 3 percent at $5.74.