Priority Health becomes first health plan to cover Guardant Health's comprehensive liquid biopsy, Guardant360®

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., July 7, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Guardant Health announced an agreement with Priority Health, one of Michigan's largest health plans, that will bring its comprehensive liquid biopsy to oncologists treating Priority Health members with advanced cancers. Priority Health is the first U.S. health plan to adopt a medical policy covering Guardant360, a comprehensive liquid biopsy that, with a simple blood draw, looks for cancer-associated alterations in 70 genes.

"As scientific evidence demonstrating the high sensitivity, specificity and clinical utility of Guardant360 mounts, oncologists are increasingly integrating this valuable tool into their practice," said Richard Lanman, MD, Guardant Health's chief medical officer. "We are thrilled that Priority Health is leading the way among insurers to help doctors provide this critical testing without having to put their patients through a repeat invasive tissue biopsy."

Guardant360 is the first and most validated comprehensive liquid biopsy available commercially. It provides comprehensive analysis of all major classes of somatic tumor alterations. The test interrogates 70 cancer genes from a simple blood draw, with near-perfect specificity and high sensitivity. Using Guardant Health's proprietary Digital Sequencing technology, Guardant360 can detect circulating-tumor DNA at mutant allele fractions (MAF) as low as 0.1%.

Evidence of Guardant360's clinical utility is growing. At the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, researchers presented results of the first prospective clinical-utility study of Guardant360. The study demonstrated high treatment-response rates among patients with advanced cancer whose therapy was selected based on Guardant360 findings. And in one of the largest cancer genomics studies ever conducted, Guardant360 was used to survey the landscape of somatic genomic alterations in solid tumors in more than 15,000 patients. The findings demonstrated very high similarity among the alterations detected by Guardant360, and those detected in large numbers of tissue samples collected by The Cancer Genome Atlas.

About Guardant Health

Guardant Health, headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., is focused on developing breakthrough diagnostics that can transform cancer from a silent killer into a manageable disease. Guardant Health was founded in 2012 by a team of serial entrepreneurs with expertise in next-generation sequencing, single-cell genomics, and cancer diagnostics. The company has raised $200 million from leading venture capital firms and its first product, Guardant360, came to market in 2014. The team is committed to positively and significantly impacting patient health through technology that addresses long-standing unmet needs in oncology.

About Priority Health

Priority Health is an award-winning, Michigan-based non-profit health plan nationally recognized for improving the health and lives of the people it serves. It continues to lead the industry in engaging members in their health, delivering effective health and disease management programs and working with physicians to improve health care outcomes and performance. Priority Health is one of only 20 health plans nationwide offering wellness programs accredited by the National Committee for Quality Assurance, an organization which also rated it among the best health plans in the nation. The State of Michigan named the Priority Health HMO the benchmark plan for all individual and group HMO plans to model.

Priority Health offers a broad portfolio of health benefit options for employer groups and individuals, including Medicare and Medicaid plans. Its network of health care providers features 95 percent of practicing physicians available in Michigan and more than 900,000 health care providers nationwide.

SOURCE Guardant Health