Benzinga | Aug 24, 2021 07:10AM EDT

Castle Biosciences Awarded US Federal Supply Schedule Contract For DecisionDx-Melanoma; Size Not Disclosed

Expands DecisionDx(r)-Melanoma Coverage to Veterans Health Administration and Military Health System Medical Centers

Castle Biosciences, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSTL), a dermatologic diagnostics company providing personalized genomic information to inform treatment decisions, today announced that it has been awarded a five-year U.S. Federal Supply Schedule (FSS) contract from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) for its DecisionDx(r)-Melanoma gene expression profile test.

The VHA is a component of and implements the healthcare program for U.S. veterans through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The contract became effective on Aug. 15, 2021, and provides greater access to DecisionDx(r)-Melanoma for veterans being treated through the VHA, the largest integrated health care system in the U.S., as well as active-duty service members and their families seeking medical treatment through the Military Health System (MHS).

"At Castle, we are committed to improving the lives of patients with skin cancer," said Derek Maetzold, president and chief executive officer of Castle Biosciences. "We believe that adding the personalized genomic information provided by our DecisionDx-Melanoma test to traditional clinical and pathology factors can help clinicians make improved treatment decisions for their patients. This contract provides veterans and active-duty service members treated in VA and MHS medical centers greater access to our test, allowing them to incorporate DecisionDx-Melanoma into their management plans."

Melanoma is the most frequently diagnosed and most deadly form of skin cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. Additionally, according to a 2017 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology (JAAD) titled "Skin cancer in the military: A systematic review of melanoma and nonmelanoma skin cancer incidence, prevention, and screening among active duty and veteran personnel," active-duty military personnel and veterans are at increased risk of developing melanoma due to occupational sun exposure.

In early-stage melanoma, reliance upon clinicopathologic staging factors alone has been shown to result in a significant overuse of sentinel lymph node biopsies and miss patients with aggressive tumor biology. DecisionDx-Melanoma uses an individual patient's tumor biology to predict the risk of cutaneous melanoma metastasis or recurrence, as well as sentinel lymph node (SLN) positivity, independent of traditional staging factors, to improve patient outcomes and inform disease management decisions.