Castle Biosciences is giving Esophageal Cancer Awareness Month the royal treatment, spending April sponsoring a series of events and initiatives to improve education, prevention and research around the condition.
The diagnostics developer announced the spate of projects Wednesday. Among them is a continuation of Castle’s existing partnership with the Esophageal Cancer Action Network. Castle is listed as a “bronze medal sponsor” of ECAN’s annual Steps to Save Lives event, a virtual 5K race and fundraising event that’s currently scheduled to take place throughout the week of April 21.
Elsewhere, Castle has collaborated with podcast Gastro Broadcast on an April episode of the show. According to Castle, which is a presenting sponsor of the podcast, the episode features host Naresh Gunaratnam, M.D., a Michigan-based gastroenterologist, interviewing Northwestern Medicine’s Sri Komanduri, M.D., about strategies to improve education around esophageal cancer. The discussion will also touch on tools to measure the risk that a patient with Barrett’s esophagus will go on to develop cancer.
Finally, Castle also signed on as a sponsor of a webinar from EndoscopyNow, which has developed an eponymous app to keep GI doctors up on the latest news and techniques. The webinar was held on Wednesday evening and featured Komanduri discussing the topic, “Current Gaps and Risk Stratification in Barrett's Esophagus.”
The awareness efforts go hand-in-hand with Castle’s work developing disease-detecting diagnostics. In addition to tests aimed at spotting skin and eye cancers, the company also makes one that’s used to assess the likelihood that a case of Barrett’s esophagus will progress into esophageal cancer.
Castle's TissueCypher uses artificial intelligence to analyze an esophageal pinch biopsy tissue sample and assign patients with a risk score, which doctors can use to guide decisions around interventions or surveillance to prevent progression into cancer.
Alongside the real-time risk score, the AI also produces a longer-term look at each patient’s risk of progression over the next five years.
“Unfortunately, esophageal cancer is often detected at its late stages and the five-year survival rate of esophageal cancer patients is less than 20%,” Emmanuel Gorospe, M.D., Castle’s GI medical director, said in this week’s announcement. “Therefore, prevention and early detection are key. We are proud to continue efforts to promote awareness of the disease and provide holistic support directed towards patients as well as the GI professional community through research, advocacy and educational initiatives.”