ANGLE PLC (AIM:AGL, OTCQX:ANPCY, FRA:DWV) (AIM:AGL) said an Austrian study has shown its Parsortix liquid biopsy system potentially could be used to monitor drug response in cancer trials, helping assess patients before, during and after therapy.
The assertion followed the release of the latest data from work using Parsortix carried out by a team at the Medical University of Innsbruck assessing samples from men being treated for metastatic prostate cancer (mPCa).
It found that epithelial circulating tumour cells (CTCs) were recovered using the ANGLE system which could then be analysed for gene expression in 80% of patients.
Notably, it revealed that the presence of CTCs declined from around 30 per sample to zero when that patient responded positively to therapy being assessed, ANGLE said.
Chief executive Andrew Newland said the work provided further evidence of the capability of the Parsortix system to provide cancer cells for analysis from a simple blood test when tissue biopsy was not feasible, with the potential to guide future treatment decisions.
This was a point echoed by Professor Iris Eder from the Innsbruck team.
"Since tissue material is often lacking in metastatic prostate cancer (mPCa), there is increasing interest in using liquid biopsies to inform treatment decisions and monitor therapy response,” she said.
“Our study is focused on the expression of a limited gene panel in an unselected, very heterogeneous cohort of patient samples, who are representative of prostate cancer patients found routinely in a clinical setting.
“Further studies are now underway to clearly define the molecular expression pattern of CTCs through RNA sequencing in order to obtain a gene panel in a defined cohort of patients with mPCa, which may be of clinical prognostic value."