LONDON (Alliance News) - ANGLE PLC on Thursday said its Parsortix system has developed an optimised workflow for the recovery and culturing of circulating tumour cells.
Parsortix allows this from a "simple" blood test to produce an effective ex-vivo culture of a patient's individual cancer cells, as its microfluidic process harvests undamaged living circulating tumour cells.
This is the first time, ANGLE said, an optimised workflow has been presented to culture tumour cells ex-vivo, which means from cells grown outside of a patient.
Current methods yield low numbers of only partly purified tumour cells, ANGLE said, that are fixed and thus killed before isolation, damaged during the cell purification process, or immobilised.
Chief Executive Andrew Newland said: "This is the first time that CTCs have been successfully cultured direct from a Parsortix processed whole blood sample. This work is highly encouraging for ANGLE.
"Firstly every metastatic breast sample analysed yielded a large number of CTCs, which is a positive sign for our FDA study. Secondly, Northwestern has achieved something that many other Centres before them have failed to do, which is to produce an optimised workflow for reproducibly growing the CTCs. This approach is potentially applicable for every metastatic breast cancer patient and provides another clear high value application for ANGLE's Parsortix system."
ANGLE shares were up 3.3% on Thursday at 47.50 pence each.
Angle (AGL)