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ANGLE acquires complementary Canadian intellectual property

Published: 08:19 05 Oct 2017 BST

Ovarian cancer
Any money left over from the fund-raising will augment working capital

ANGLE PLC (LON:AGL) (OTCQX:ANPCY) is to acquire some assets from a Canadian company with intellectual property that complements ANGLE’s Parsortix liquid biopsy platform.

ANGLE is paying C$6.16mln, or roughly £3.7mln, for the assets. Eight of the Axela team will be moving on to ANGLE’s payroll.

WATCH: ANGLE to offer a full liquid biopsy 'sample to answer' solution following Axela acquisition

Company management believes Axela's downstream analysis solution is particularly well suited to ANGLE's proposed clinical applications.

The Axela system will complement Parsortix by providing an analysis element to ANGLE’s offering, enabling the UK company to capture a greater proportion of the liquid biopsy value chain.

In the six months to the end of March 2017, Axela made an underlying loss of C$348,000 on revenue of C$335,000.

WATCH: ANGLE inks agreement with world-leading molecular testing provider

ANGLE is financing the proposed acquisition through a share issue at 35p a pop that will raise £12.2mln. As well as paying for the acquisition, the funds raised will support the integration of Axela into the ANGLE business, with any surplus funds financing the completion of ovarian cancer triaging assay optimisation and validation studies by ANGLE.

The shares issued represent around 46% of the current share capital of ANGLE.

READ: ANGLE establishes co-marketing agreement with leading molecular testing solutions provider QIAGEN

"We are delighted to announce the conditional acquisition of certain assets from Axela that enable the downstream analysis of circulating tumour cells (CTCs) harvested by ANGLE's Parsortix system. These assets, in combination with Parsortix, are expected to enable ANGLE to offer a full liquid biopsy ‘sample to answer’ solution,” said Andrew Newland, the founder and chief executive of ANGLE.

"Axela is a highly sensitive platform that can analyse up to 100 genes simultaneously and at a low cost. Its performance was proven analysing the CTCs harvested by Parsortix in our US ANG-003 200 patient ovarian cancer study,” Newland added.

“We believe the Parsortix Axela combination will provide a highly effective cancer gene panel solution based on a simple blood test that has the potential to enable precision medicine and transform cancer care in the future. Cancer is a highly heterogeneous disease and we believe that cancer gene panels are a key element in providing effective clinical applications,” Newland said.

The acquisition will not alter ANGLE’s strategy of integrating its cell harvesting technique with other downstream analysis technologies.

“The goal is for Parsortix to become the adopted standard for harvesting cancer cells for analysis from blood across a wide range of clinical applications in different cancer types,” Newland said.

Shares in ANGLE rose 2.2% to 36.8p on the news.

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on 17/1/24