ANGLE PLC (AIM:AGL, OTCQX:ANPCY) said new research into lung cancer highlighted the benefits of its Parsortix liquid biopsy in capturing circulating tumour cells (CTCs).
Vienna's Medical University used Parsortix in a study to isolate CTCs in patients with Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC).
In preliminary spiking experiments, CTC capture rates for the Parsortix system were established with two NSCLC cell lines spiked into healthy volunteer blood.
Capture rates as high as 80% were observed, said ANGLE, further confirming the high capture rates observed in previous studies.
Blood was then collected either at baseline or at disease progression in 118 NSCLC patients and processed with the Parsortix system.
ANGLE said the study showed the relevance of CTCs harvested from a simple blood test using Parsortix as a tool for the clinical management of NSCLC.
"In the age of immunotherapy, CTCs may offer potentially useful clinical information at the cellular level, for example PD-L1 gene expression before treatment, at treatment and during follow-up", Professor Robert Zeillinger, Head of Molecular Oncology at the university said.
ANGLE chief executive, Andrew Newland, added: "Whilst ctDNA, which is derived from fragments of dead cells, has become a widely utilised tool for the stratification of NSCLC patients, it is limited to analysis of DNA alone.
"Intact living CTCs harvested using the Parsortix system allow for analysis of key protein targets for drug therapy, such as PD-L1 status, in addition to gene expression profiling (RNA) for any gene of interest.
"Gene expression analysis is becoming increasingly recognised as critical in understanding the true nature of a patient's cancer.
"In contrast, analysis of DNA mutations alone may fail to identify the correct patients for targeted treatment, as the genes containing these mutations may not actually be expressed."