New research has shown ANGLE plc’s (LON:AGL OTCQX:ANPCY) liquid biopsy could help provide a breakthrough in the treatment of late-stage prostate cancer.
For the company’s Parsortix system can be used to measure the expression of androgen receptor splice variant 7, or ARV7 for short.
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Measurement of ARV7 on circulating tumour cells captured by devices such as Parsortix can help dictate whether a patient receives next-generation hormone therapies such as Enzalutamide and Abiraterone, or is administered chemotherapy right away.
Where ARV7 is positively expressed, patients are unlikely to respond to hormone treatment and would benefit from moving directly to chemo. Where it is not expressed, patients may respond better receiving hormone drugs first before moving to chemotherapy.
The results emanated from work carried out by the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf, the Medical University of Graz and the Science for Life Laboratory, Stockholm University. They studied later-stage prostate cancer patients.
Tests using Parstortix have a number of advantages over other approaches, not least a cost-saving element of an estimated US$5,000 per patient.
Researchers also believe that an ARV7 test using the ANGLE system for circulating tumour cell (CTC) enrichment was able to capture certain crucial cell groups that would not have been detected in other using other methods.
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Current approaches are only able to measure the presence or absence ARV7; Parsortix was able to estimate the number of ‘transcripts’. It was also able to discern which circulating tumour cell had ARV7 and which didn’t.
CTCs are tell-tell signs of cancer found in the bloodstream.
Dr Amin El-Heliebi, Principal Investigator, Medical University of Graz, said: "Use of the Parsortix system has, for the first time to our knowledge, made it possible to investigate the number of cells expressing the ARV7 transcript as a proportion of the total number of CTCs and for the first time it has been possible to investigate the number of ARV7 transcripts on a particular cell.
“This approach may allow us to improve clinical performance in this key area of prostate cancer treatment."