LONDON (ShareCast) - (Sharecast News) - Liquid biopsy company Angle announced on Tuesday that the liquid biopsy analysis unit at the Health Research Institute of Santiago in Spain has published results of new work undertaken in head and neck cancer and non small cell lung cancer, on the potential utility of a liquid biopsy-based strategy to assess MET alterations on circulating tumour cells (CTCs).
The AIM-traded firm said MET alterations in cancer patients could provide a biomarker to evaluate which patients would benefit from treatment with a new class of drug called MET inhibitors.

It said the MET-related cancer pathways could activate cell proliferation, survival, migration, motility, invasion, angiogenesis, apoptosis and epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition.

Thus, the MET pathways had a "fundamental bearing" on the rate of growth and spread of cancer, it explained.

MET changes had mostly been associated with metastatic patients, and normally appeared with progression of the cancer.

As a result, the original tissue biopsy could be out-of-date and unreliable for assessing the current MET status, Angle explained.

Repeat tissue biopsies might not be possible, if the metastatic site could not be accessed, the patient was too ill for the invasive procedure, or there was insufficient tissue available for biopsy analysis.

The researchers were the first to investigate the use of liquid biopsy systems to capture CTCs in order to investigate MET expression levels in the cancer, the company said in a study comparing the utility of its 'Parsortix' system to that of the leading antibody-based CTC system.

It said the head and neck cancer results using Parsortix showed a significant association of the presence of MET positive CTCs, which was a minority of patients, and poorer overall survival of those patients.

For comparative purposes, the leading antibody-based CTC system was used at the same time with the same patients.

That system reportedly had significantly lower CTC positivity than Parsortix, and there was no relationship between MET expression in the CTCs obtained by the antibody-based system with patient survival.

Angle said the research suggested that there was potential for the Parsortix system to be used as part of a biomarker approach in cancer drug trials of MET inhibitors, and then potentially as a companion diagnostic to identify patients likely to respond to the MET inhibitor drugs

The paper, titled 'Detection of MET Alterations Using Cell Free DNA and Circulating Tumor Cells from Cancer Patients', was published in the peer-reviewed journal Cells.

"The analysis of MET status on CTCs using Parsortix is a new and promising area of investigation for cancer treatment," said founder and chief executive officer Andrew Newland.

"This research further demonstrates Parsortix's applicability and we will now consider how we can add it to our sample-to-answer imaging solutions for use in pharma services cancer drug trials."

At 1557 BST, shares in Angle were down 1.94% at 65.7p.

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