ANGLE PLC (AIM:AGL, OTCQX:ANPCY) unveiled its innovative Portrait+ CTC staining kit at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS).
This new product, leveraging ANGLE's Parsortix liquid biopsy technology, marks a significant advancement in cancer diagnostics by allowing the precise identification, characterisation, and enumeration of epithelial and mesenchymal cancer cells, including those in the critical transition state of epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT).
EMT is a crucial process in cancer progression, drug resistance development, and metastasis formation.
The Portrait+ CTC staining kit has undergone extensive development, optimisation, and validation to provide advanced immunofluorescent staining of CTCs harvested from patient blood samples, ANGLE said.
This kit stands out for its ability to deliver reliable and repeatable results, setting a new standard in CTC protocols used by academic and research institutions, the company added.
It features an optimised vivid dye combination for direct staining, ensuring high signal intensity alongside high analytical specificity and sensitivity. The kit also includes pre-mixed and freeze-dried antibodies for ease of use and long-term storage.
A notable inclusion in the kit is the CellKeep slide, a unique CTC harvesting technology developed by ANGLE. This technology maximises the retention of CTCs for imaging by confining harvested CTCs to a small area.
This approach reduces the volume of antibodies required for staining, decreases imaging time and cost, and minimizes cell loss between the Parsortix system and the imaging process, ANGLE told investors.
The Portrait+ CTC staining kit is not just prognostic for overall survival, but it also has the potential to monitor drug treatment response, detect early development of metastases, and assess therapeutic response more quickly than traditional imaging methods, the company said,
The kit is suitable for use in multiple cancer types, including breast, lung, prostate, and ovarian cancers, and is set to transform the approach to cancer diagnosis and management, it added.
"ANGLE's Portrait+ CTC staining kit provides investigators with accurate, repeatable, and precise identification of CTCs and hence has the potential to optimise study protocols and minimise cost," chief executive Andrew Newland explained.
"We are now beginning an active promotion of this test to academic and translational research customers. The standardisation and simplification of the cell staining process and the new innovations to retain the harvested cells on the microscope slide will expand the market for Parsortix technology as it will make it easier for customers to adopt the solution in their own laboratories."