A company called Vermillion is crowing about a poster released at the recent SGO meeting. They are developing an ovarian cancer screening test they call OvaCalc. We get very emotional here at InteractMD.com over ovarian cancer screening because of the disproportionately high burden this disease places on younger women. OvaSure seemed to self-destruct over consternation from the FDA...it'll come back from the dead if it really is a good test. The claim is that "In this cohort of women undergoing surgery for an ovarian tumor the OvaCalc algorithm effectively identifies women with a higher likelihood of malignancy." Funny thing is "higher" is not quantified by a p value at all. Usually when you make a comparison you have numbers to back it up. They revealed the lack of discriminatory value with their test in a figure in their poster presentation. Looks like there was very little discrimination between patients with ovarian cancer and normal patients using the test. So while at first glance a headline like "Ovarian cancer test is positive in 90% of cases " the real story is in whether there's any difference in results between cancer patients and normal patients. There is a statistic that captures the discriminatory capabilities of a lab test: AUC-ROC. It's expressed as a number less than one and the closer to 1.0 it gets the better the test performs. PSA is up in the .8 range while breast MRI is probably in the .9 range. Three guesses as to the AUC-ROC with this OvaCalc...they didn't report it. You can bet it wasn't very high. Keep working guys. http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/12/121814/OVA1SGO2009post... http://ir.ciphergen.com/preview/phoenix.zhtml?c=121814&p=irol-newsArticl...