Myriad Genetics Arm Offers New Vectra DA Data - Analyst Blog

Myriad Genetics, Inc.'s MYGN subsidiary, Crescendo Bioscience has published a new study for its Vectra DA blood test in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases online journal.  

The study is a retrospective analysis of data from the Swedish Farmacotherapy (SWEFOT) clinical trial. It reveals that Vectra DA is a strong predictor of radiographically visible damage to joints – known as disease progression – in patients diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis RA for the first time.

Crescendo Bioscience is a wholly-owned subsidiary of CA-based Myriad Genetics, which is a molecular diagnostics company dedicated to developing and commercializing quantitative blood tests for rheumatoid arthritis RA and other autoimmune diseases. Vectra DA is the only multi-biomarker blood test validated to assess disease activity in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

The study, conducted on 235 patients in SWEFOT, evaluated the Vectra DA test score as a predictor of one-year radiographic progression in them. All these patients are inflicted with early-stage rheumatoid arthritis and have not been previously treated with a disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drug (DMARD).

The study results showed that the Vectra DA score at baseline was an independent predictor of radiographic progression over one year of DMARD treatment. Among the 201 patients with a high Vectra DA score at baseline, 21% had radiographic progression at one year. In contrast, only 3.4% of the 34 patients with a low/moderate Vectra DA score had radiographic progression at one year. This confirmed that patients who have a low score are at low risk of progression.

Additionally, Vectra DA emerged successful in effectively differentiating patients with and without disease progression, when compared to the C-reactive protein CRP test and other traditional measures of disease activity, including DAS28-CRP. These findings emphasize the clinical value of Vectra DA in predicting disease progression in newly diagnosed patients with RA. The study also highlighted Vectra DA's potential to help doctors manage patients based on their risk of disease progression.

Moreover, these findings take forward earlier results from the Leiden Early Arthritis Cohort study published in Rheumatology (Oxford), which showed that patients with a high Vectra DA score were at a six-fold higher risk of disease progression than those with a low Vectra DA score.

The recent study validates that Vectra DA when conducted before starting anti-rheumatic therapies, can help clinicians obtain more knowledge about the patient's prognosis, enabling them to administer more informed treatment decisions.

Myriad Genetics currently holds a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). Some other stocks worth considering in the biomedical industry include ANI Pharmaceuticals, Inc. ANIP, Illumina Inc. ILMN, and Osiris Therapeutics, Inc. OSIR. All these stocks carry the same Zacks Rank as Myriad Genetics.
 

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