Australian diagnostics firm Healthlinx has published data from an ongoing multi-national clinical trial of its OvPlex ovarian cancer test in the Journal of Translational Medicine.
In the study, which analyzed samples from a total of 742 ovarian cancer cases and controls, OvPlex distinguished borderline and malignant ovarian cancer from controls and benign cases with an area under the curve of 88.5 percent, compared to 84.3 percent for CA125 alone, currently the standard biomarker for ovarian cancer diagnosis.
Based on these results, Healthlinx now plans to launch a follow-up prospective trial of OvPlex and has extended an existing collaboration with Lewis Perrin of Queensland's Mater Health Services "to oversee design and implementation" of the trial, it said in a statement.
The company added that this prospective study would take roughly a year, with the first nine months focused on patient recruitment and the remaining three months on data analysis.
The two parties will also expand their collaboration to obtain additional clinical data assessing the prognostic value of an undisclosed protein biomarker for ovarian cancer. In February, Healthlinx released data from a 200-patient study that indicated the protein's expression levels could be used to predict patient outcomes (PM 2/17/2012).