Vermillion's CA125 positive preliminary data against ovarian tumors presented at WCSGO

Vermillion, a molecular diagnostics company, today announced the presentation of positive preliminary data from its collaboration with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to identify biomarkers that improve on the specificity of CA125 for the identification of malignant ovarian tumors.  These results were presented at the 42nd Annual Meeting on Women's Cancer of the Society of Gynecologic Oncologists, March 6-9, 2011 in Orlando, Florida.

The poster titled "Identification of Biomarkers to Improve Specificity in Preoperative Assessment of Ovarian Tumor for Risk of Cancer" evaluated more than 20 candidate biomarkers for their ability to complement CA125 in distinguishing benign from malignant ovarian tumors, with an emphasis on markers that could improve on the clinical specificity. Of the candidate markers, three markers demonstrated the ability to complement CA125 using multivariate logistic regression. These studies were conducted by Drs. Daniel Chan and Zhen Zhang at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.  Dr. Chan is Professor of Pathology, Oncology, Radiology, and Urology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Director of the Clinical Chemistry Division and Co-Director of the Pathology Core Laboratory of Johns Hopkins Hospital. He is also Director of the Biomarker Discovery Center at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Zhen Zhang is an Associate Professor of Pathology also at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

"Markers that can improve the clinical specificity of current tools for ovarian cancer detection will enhance our ability to test patients in whom cancer is suspected. These results pave the way for further studies that could lead to additional novel tests in the ovarian cancer space," said Dr. Eric T. Fung, Chief Science Officer at Vermillion.