Telo Genomics Corp. announced that the American Society of Hematology (ASH) has accepted the results of TeloView-SMM technical repeatability validation for presentation at their annual meeting in December of this year. The study was led by Dr. Hans Knecht, MD, Director of the Division of Hematology at McGill University and the Jewish General Hospital, Montreal, Canada.

The study, entitled 3D-Telomere Profiling Assay Identifies High Risk Smoldering Multiple Myeloma Patients with High Precision will be presented on Sunday, December 10, 2023. Per ASH regulations, the study results are under embargo until presented. The 65th ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition will take place December 9-12, 2023, in San Diego, California.

Founded in 1958 and with more than 17,000 members from nearly 100 countries, ASH serves both clinicians and scientists around the world who are working to conquer blood diseases. TeloView-SMM has the potential to be an important tool for physicians managing the care of patients diagnosed with Smoldering MultipleMyeloma. The proprietary assay (and associated platform technology) quantifies individual patients' risk of transformation/progression by measuring the 3D structure and spatial organization of telomeres.

This molecular signature identifies high-risk SMM patients who are likely to benefit from earlier treatment intervention. The larger subset of low-risk patients may not require immediate treatment and can be regularly monitored using the TeloView-SMM assay along with standard phenotypic measures. Over 200,000 patients in the United States are currently living with smoldering Multiple Myeloma.

The TeloView-SMM test has a potential total addressable market of over 500,000 tests per year. The introduction of next-generation therapies (including targeted treatments) has increased the median survival rate to over 5 years, but MM is still considered incurable. Two asymptomatic precursors, Monoclonal Gammopathy of unknown Significance ("MGUS") and SMM generally precede the progression to classic symptomatic MM.

While MGUS carries a steady risk of progression of 1% per year, SMM is more heterogenous with nearly 40% of patients progressing in the first 5 years, 15% in the next 5 years, reaching the same low risk as MGUS after 10 years. To date, identifying patients who will more rapidly progress to MM remains an important clinical need. MM treatment includes various combinations of drugs with a cost as high as $150,000 per year per patient.

As most patients will develop resistance to treatment and relapse within a median of 2 years, identifying them proactively remains another important clinical need. Notably, the total addressable market for both MM assays is over 750,000 tests per year in the US.