Angle upbeat on research into Parsortix with melanoma patients

Liquid biopsy company Angle announced on Tuesday that a customer, the Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia, has published results of research into the use of its ‘Parsortix’ system with melanoma patients.

The AIM-traded firm said the research showed that Parsortix could be used to investigate the heterogeneity of the cancer, allowing full molecular analysis of it.

It explained that the researchers believed that opened the potential for liquid biopsy to be used for prognostication and treatment response monitoring in melanoma.

In a pilot study of 28 melanoma patients, those with circulating tumour cells present in their blood, harvested by Parsortix, had significantly shorter overall survival with a hazard ratio of 7.8x, meaning that patients with a positive Parsortix CTC score were 7.8x more likely to die during a 60 week follow-up period than those with a negative CTC score.

In clinical use, the stratification of patients into high and low risk groups could allow improved treatment decisions, taking into account disease status, Angle explained.

The research also compared results from the Parsortix system with some competing systems using matched samples, and apparently determined that Parsortix yielded the highest recovery of CTCs and had lower white blood cell background.

Angke said Parsortix also did not require pre-processing of the blood, whereas the competing systems required a number of pre-processing steps to be undertaken manually to remove red blood cells prior to processing.

“This work clearly demonstrates the promising clinical utility of the Parsortix system for metastatic melanoma prognostication and monitoring treatment response,” said Elin Gray, associate professor of the Melanoma Research Group at the School of Medical and Health Sciences at Edith Cowan University.

“We now intend to progress our work with Parsortix to identify ways in which we can improve the treatment of melanoma patients.”

Angle founder and chief executive Andrew Newland added that it was “another great example” of one of the firm’s customers developing new pilot studies to show the potential clinical utility of Parsortix in other cancer types and applications.

“Melanoma is an important opportunity for future use of Parsortix.”

At 1522 GMT, shares in Angle were up 5.8% at 73p.