Dr. Rick Baehner, Abbott’s chief medical officer for precision oncology, spoke to MedTech Dive about how the new version of the Oncodetect test performs and the market it addresses.

Abbott on Monday launched a new version of its Oncodetect molecular residual disease test designed to better monitor for traces of cancer in the body after treatment.

MRD tests look for tiny amounts of circulating tumor DNA, or ctDNA, in the blood to act as an early warning signal for cancer recurrence. The goal is to detect recurring disease earlier than traditional methods like imaging scans.

Abbott’s new test, based on technology developed at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, uses whole-genome sequencing to track as many as 5,000 patient-specific cancer mutations, compared with up to 200 variants in the earlier Oncodetect test.

“You're seeing an evolution,” Dr. Rick Baehner, Abbott’s chief medical officer for precision oncology, said in an interview. “It's bringing together the advances in genomic science. It’s showing a major impact on clinical evidence, and there's incredible excitement in precision oncology that this is really going to help illuminate what was previously difficult to detect, and frankly, the Achilles' heel of MRD.”

Abbott acquired Oncodetect in its $21 billion acquisition of Exact Sciences, which closed in March.

The new version of the test can find circulating tumor DNA levels below one part per million, compared with 15 to 50 parts per million in the old test, which relied on whole-exome sequencing, Baehner said.

“You're looking for that ct, or circulating tumor, DNA that's hiding — that needle in a haystack of the cell-free DNA that comes from white blood cells and cells that are undergoing normal apoptosis,” said Baehner.

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