LONDON (ShareCast) - (ShareCast News) - UK-based liquid biopsy company Angle relayed two encouraging medical developments relating to its Parsortix cancer biopsy system.
Parsortix, which the company hopes will be a catalyst in a move from the current "one drug fits all" towards "precision medicine" where liquid biopsies of living tumour cells can be examined by doctors to personalise the treatment, was used by one laboratory customer to successfully grow circulating tumour cells (CTC) harvested by a Parsortix device in its laboratory.

The cells grown in the culture harboured genomic abnormalities, confirming their malignant origin as they continued to proliferate several months after the harvest, providing the customer with a renewable population of cells for ongoing research and investigation outside the patient.

The customer, a research group from the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany, presented their results at the European CTC conference.

Angle founder and chief executive Andrew Newland said, "This is the first time that a patient's CTCs harvested by Parsortix have been successfully cultured. The Parsortix system's capability to harvest living, viable cancer cells is a key differentiator and we believe this will lead to new avenues of research using Parsortix."

At the same conference Professor Stuart Martin of the University of Maryland School of Medicine presented breakthrough research that also utilised Parsortix, providing evidence that 90% of deaths from cancer arise from metastasis, the process of cancer spreading through the body via CTCs in the blood and causing secondary cancers.

Martin said that if drugs could be identified for the patient that disables their CTCs then metastatic spread of the disease could potentially be reduced or arrested altogether.

Using the Parsortix system, Martin's laboratory isolated CTCs from the blood of breast cancer patients and mice transplanted with human breast tumour cells with the recovered CTCs being held in place within the Parsortix cassette.

"The significant number of presentations featuring Parsortix at this leading conference for advances in the field of circulating tumour cells suggests that Angle's strategy of promoting research use sales to drive widespread adoption of its CTC harvesting system is working well," said Newland.

"Parsortix is compatible with numerous downstream analysis systems and our aim is for it to become the default system for cancer liquid biopsy, a growing market that is expected to reach $14bn in the United States alone by 2025."

Speaking on the effect of these new revelations to the company's standing, Finncap analyst Mark Brewer said, "this conference shows that Parsortix is gaining traction in the research arena, which should build further awareness of its utility with the aim of becoming the leading system for capturing CTCs."

As of 1620 BST, shares had inched up 1.7% to 38.90p.

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