Nine moths after listing on the ASX, Cleo Diagnostics (ASX:COV) has made its first major biotech breakthrough.
The company – developing a blood test to detect ovarian cancer as opposed to relying on ultrasound – has declared its blood tests detected 90% of early-stage cancers in participating patients.
“[The test] significantly outperforms current clinical workflows that use CA125 and ultrasound to predict malignancy,” the company wrote on Wednesday.
CA125 refers to an existing type of blood test that looks for a protein of the same name with “CA” standing for “cancer antigen.”
In mid-March, the company posted partial evidence showing that its product correctly caught cancers in the participating donors of blood whose diagnoses were missed in a CA125 test.
The company also reported on Wednesday that CLEO’s own blood test methodology (and product) has now shown superior performance to “all current routine clinical tools,” which in its view, is evidence of “significant global potential.”
Despite these positive results, the company’s share price was unmoved in the first twenty minutes of trade and remained at 17cps.
“Having demonstrated now that the CLEO ovarian cancer blood test is far superior to CA125 and ultrasound in our initial pre-surgical triage market, we open up new dialogue with physicians to consider the potential material benefits that CLEO brings for their patients,” CLEO CEO Richard Allman said.
“More broadly, these encouraging results on early-stage cancer detection provide impetus for us to progress the development of CLEO’s screening test for ovarian cancer.”
So far, all clinical evidence has been posted in peer-reviewed journals, which the company describes as a strategy to acquire “gold standard” clinical data.
COV last traded at 17cps.