CpG Diagnostics develops a blood test for a difficult ovarian-mass decision
When imaging reveals a mass near an ovary, clinicians must decide how to manage it without always knowing whether it is cancer. CpG Diagnostics is developing a blood test called OvaPrint to add information before treatment or surgery. The test is in clinical validation and is not yet commercially available.
A focused clinical question
OvaPrint is intended for women aged 18 or older with an already identified adnexal mass, a growth near the uterus that can involve an ovary or fallopian tube. It is not being presented here as a general screening test for people without a known mass.
The approach examines cell-free DNA, fragments circulating in blood, for methylation patterns, chemical marks that can differ between cancer and benign tissue. Machine learning combines those patterns into a risk assessment. CpG Diagnostics says it intends the result to inform decisions such as whether to refer a patient to a gynecologic oncologist.
Founder and CEO Bodour Salhia developed the underlying research in her laboratory. The company says the technology is exclusively licensed from the University of Southern California.
From an early classifier to broader testing
In a 2023 study, researchers trained an earlier OvaPrint classifier on blood samples from 82 people with high-grade serous ovarian cancer and 100 with benign masses. Using repeated cross-validation, they estimated sensitivity of about 84% and specificity of 96% for distinguishing those groups. These measures describe how often the classifier identified the cancer samples and the benign samples, respectively.