New Publication Demonstrates Ability of Veracyte’s Decipher Bladder Test to Identify Tumors Most Likely to Respond to Chemotherapy

Veracyte, Inc., (Nasdaq: VCYT) announced today the publication of new data demonstrating that the company’s Decipher Bladder genomic classifier accurately identifies bladder tumors that are most likely to respond to chemotherapy prior to radical cystectomy. These findings could ultimately help physicians optimize treatment planning for their patients with bladder cancer based on their tumor subtype biology. The peer-reviewed paper appears online today in The Journal of Urology.

Patients diagnosed with non-metastatic muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) often undergo neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) prior to standard-of-care radical cystectomy, even though the absolute survival benefit associated with the addition of NAC to radical cystectomy is 5-10%. Until recently, there was no reliable way to determine which MIBC tumors would – or would not – respond to chemotherapy. Molecular subtyping with the Decipher Bladder genomic classifier has shown that biological differences in MIBC are strongly associated with chemotherapy response.

“Our findings are among the first to show the clinical utility of implementing molecular subtyping in order to identify patients for whom NAC is most likely to confer significant benefit,” said Yair Lotan, MD, professor of urology and chief of urologic oncology at UT Southwestern Medical Center, and the paper’s lead author. “This study represents meaningful progress in clinically validating biomarkers that are associated with chemotherapy response in patients with MIBC, and it offers hope that we will be able to better manage these patients in the future by accurately selecting those most likely to benefit from additional treatment.”

In this multicenter retrospective study, scientists evaluated the use of the Decipher Bladder genomic classifier in a cohort of 601 patients. After three years, patients with classifier-identified luminal tumors (37% of the study population) experienced no additional benefit to overall survival (OS) from receiving NAC prior to radical cystectomy (63% OS with NAC and 65% OS without). However, those patients whose tumors were classified as non-luminal (63% of the study population) experienced a significant benefit from the addition of NAC, with 10% greater overall survival after three years as compared to patients who were treated with cystectomy alone (71% vs. 61%).