LONDON (ShareCast) - (Sharecast News) - Liquid biopsy company Angle has completed the fitout and staffing of its clinical services laboratories in Guildford and Pennsylvania, it announced on Tuesday.

The AIM-traded firm said the launch was ahead of schedule, with the US laboratory being completed sooner than expected and the UK lab opening in line with anticipated timescales.

It said together, the laboratories would allow the company to accelerate the commercial deployment of its 'Parsortix' system, by offering services to pharmaceutical and biotech customers for use in cancer drug clinical trials and, once the laboratories were accredited and its tests validated, through the provision of laboratory-developed tests (LDTs) for patient care.

Angle said its sample-to-answer liquid biopsy solution using a simple blood test enabled longitudinal monitoring of patients during drug trials, before, during and after drug intervention, which was not possible with tissue biopsy.

That represented a "significant" market opportunity for the firm, the board said, adding that in a single subset of the market, there were more than 2,000 PD-L1 and PD-1 interventional trials registered in the US, enrolling over 300,000 patients, which would be potential targets for its pharma services business.

Angle said it was targeting future clinical studies for adoption of the Parsortix system, and had developed service capabilities in the UK and the US to process samples on a commercial scale as part of global pharma trials.

It had already begun dialogue with prospective customers and collaborators for the deployment of CTC liquid biopsy analysis in cancer drug trials, with a number of those conversations said to be at an advanced stage.

Both the UK and US laboratories would seek ISO15189 accreditation, and the US laboratory would also seek Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) accreditation, which would allow it to market LDTs for clinical use.

Given the extensive clinical work already completed with the ovarian cancer pelvic mass triage assay, it was expected that it would be the company's first LDT to market.

"The new clinical services laboratories are an important element in the company's commercial strategy and we are pleased to launch the global offering ahead of schedule," said founder and chief executive officer Andrew Newland.

"This will accelerate commercialisation of the Parsortix system and act as a demonstrator to support product deployment."

Newland said that as well as working with pharmaceutical company customers directly, the firm was keen to work with contract research organisations both as a white-label service and, when they wished to deploy the tests internally, by supplying Parsortix systems so that they could directly offer CTC services for cancer drug trials.

"This will enable us to scale the commercial use of the Parsortix system in this large market.

"We are in advanced discussions with potential customers and we look forward to updating the market on the first contracts in due course."

At 1521 BST, shares in Angle were up 2.61% at 82.6p.

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