Angle to collaborate with USC Norris on breast cancer treatment

The collaboration follows four months of evaluation by USC Norris of Angle's Parsortix system and will see it focus on using the system to harvest circulating tumour cells (CTCs) for analysis.

CTCs are obtained through a blood test and offer a much less invasive alternative to the more common practice of biopsying for biomarker testing in metastatic cancer. Both methods are used to gain better understanding of the status of the disease to aid therapeutic decisions, such as the most appropriate chemotherapy regime.

Angle explained that USC Norris has pursued this area of research alone but both the existing in-market CTC system, several others under development and its own in-house process have found to have specific drawback in their application.

USC Norris has already already developed core processes needed to undertake a certain type of analysis of the breast cancer CTCs once harvested by the Parsortix system.

The collaboration will focus on evaluating and developing various aspects of the process to determine how it can be used to treat breast cancer in clinical practice.

Chief executive of Angle, Andrew Newland, said: "We hope that, using the Parsortix system to harvest CTCs, [UCS Norris] may be able to develop new approaches which replace invasive biopsies of secondary cancers with non-invasive blood tests and improve the overall outcome for breast cancer patients in the future."

The group added that its top priority was the establishment of collaborations with key opinion leaders at world class research centres, which are working to identify applications with medical utility and to secure clinical data that demonstrate that utility in patient studies.

"Angle believes this is the optimal approach for unlocking the multi-billion dollar worldwide market available to the company and its potential strategic partners," it added.