DermTech Presents Research Abstracts at the 2024 American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) Annual Meeting and New Research Published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology

DermTech, Inc. (NASDAQ: DMTK) (DermTech or the Company), a leader in precision dermatology enabled by a non-invasive skin genomics technology, today announced the presentation of two research abstracts at the 2024 American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) Annual Meeting, taking place March 8th-12th in San Diego, California.

The first research abstract, “Non-invasive gene expression analyses to rule out melanoma in patients with Fitzpatrick skin types IV-VI” will be presented March 9th at 8:45am PT by Maral K. Skelsey, MD, lead author and Clinical Professor of Dermatology at Georgetown University’s Medical School. In this research, the negative predictive value (NPV) for both Fitzpatrick skin type group I-III and Fitzpatrick skin type group IV-VI was greater than 99%, and the 95% confidence interval indicated that there was no significant difference between the skin phototype groups.

“This real-world clinical study demonstrates that the DMT can help clinicians improve outcomes for cutaneous melanomas in patients of all skin types,” commented Dr. Skelsey. “This is especially important because ruling out melanoma in individuals with Fitzpatrick IV-VI skin types can be particularly challenging.”

The second research abstract titled, “Skin cancer risk is increased by somatic mutations detected noninvasively in healthy-appearing sun-exposed skin” will be presented March 9^th at 10:05am PT by lead author John Whitaker, Ph.D., Senior Director of Bioinformatics at DermTech. The research found that somatic mutations in healthy-appearing sun-exposed skin indicate an increased risk for skin cancer. Furthermore, these mutations capture skin cancer risk information that is not accounted for by other risk factors.

A complete description of this research has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology and will be published on March 19^th: (https://www.jidonline.org/article/S0022-202X(24)00176-3/fulltext)

This research study used non-invasively sampled DNA from healthy-appearing skin, in a reference cohort of 1,038 individuals, to measure the occurrence of somatic mutations at skin cancer-associated hotspots located within TP53 and NOTCH1. The number of detected mutations was combined with clinical variables known to be associated with skin cancer risk to create a skin cancer risk model (DNA-Skin Cancer Assessment of Risk, DNA-SCAR). DNA-SCAR’s risk calculation was validated by comparison to the U.S. population and was trained to predict personal history of skin cancer from age, family history, skin tone and mutation count.