Biocept, Inc., a US based  commercial provider of liquid biopsy tests designed to provide physicians with clinically actionable information to improve the outcomes of patients diagnosed with cancer, announces that it has been awarded South Korean Patent No. 2010601, entitled METHODS FOR DETECTING NUCLEIC ACID SEQUENCE VARIANTS. The patent provides intellectual property protection for the Company's Switch-Blocker technology, which is core to Biocept's Target Selector™ assays for molecular analysis using real-time PCR, Sanger sequencing and next-generation sequencing (NGS).

Biocept's "Switch-Blocker" technology allows normal (wild-type) nucleic acid material, such as normal DNA, to be significantly blocked from amplification, while allowing genetic alterations associated with cancer and other diseases to be amplified. This method increases the detection sensitivity of genetic alterations such as cancer mutations in low abundance, as the "noise" associated with normal genetic sequences is significantly reduced.

The Switch-Blocker technology may also reduce the cost of running assays, such as NGS assays, because the expense of sequencing large amounts of uninformative wild-type nucleic acid is eliminated. In clinical validation studies, Biocept has demonstrated, with a high degree of correlation, the ability to detect the same biomarkers in blood that were identified from tissue biopsy from the same patients. Using a blood specimen to provide information on biomarkers found on solid tumors offers the benefits of reducing the risks and costs of biopsy relative to tissue, has convenience advantages, and can enable the ability to non-invasively conduct serial monitoring of patient specimens over time.