RNS - Another application for Parsortix12 May 2020 08:10
Angle PLC CTC potential as biomarker in MET inhibitor trials
Source: RNS Non-Regulatory
TIDMAGL
Angle PLC
12 May 2020
For immediate release 12 May 2020
ANGLE plc ("the Company")
MET EXPRESSION OF PARSORTIX-HARVESTED CTCs FROM CANCER PATIENTS HAS POTENTIAL AS BIOMARKER FOR MET INHIBITOR DRUG TRIALS
Potential for liquid biopsy solution to drive new areas of cancer treatment
Parsortix performance demonstrates key advantages over alternative approaches
ANGLE plc (AIM:AGL OTCQX:ANPCY), a world-leading liquid biopsy company, is pleased to announce that the Liquid Biopsy Analysis Unit at the Health Research Institute of Santiago, Spain has published results of new work undertaken in head and neck cancer and non small cell lung cancer on the potential utility of a liquid biopsy-based strategy to assess MET alterations on circulating tumour cells (CTCs).
MET alterations in cancer patients may provide a biomarker to evaluate which patients will benefit from treatment with a new class of drug called MET inhibitors. The MET-related cancer pathways can activate cell proliferation, survival, migration, motility, invasion, angiogenesis, apoptosis and epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition. Thus, the MET pathways have a fundamental bearing on the rate of growth and spread of cancer.
MET changes have mostly been associated with metastatic patients and normally appear with progression of the cancer. Consequently the original tissue biopsy may be out-of-date and unreliable for assessing the current MET status. Repeat tissue biopsies may not be possible if the metastatic site cannot be accessed, the patient is too ill for the invasive procedure or there is insufficient tissue available for biopsy analysis. The researchers are the first to investigate the use of liquid biopsy systems to capture CTCs in order to investigate MET expression levels in the cancer, in a study comparing the utility of Parsortix to that of the leading antibody-based CTC system.
The head and neck cancer results using Parsortix showed a significant association of the presence of MET positive CTCs, which was a minority of patients, and poorer overall survival of those patients. For comparative purposes, the leading antibody-based CTC system was utilised in parallel with the same patients. This system had significantly lower CTC positivity than Parsortix and there was no relationship between MET expression in the CTCs obtained by the antibody-based system with patient survival.
This research suggests that there is potential for the Parsortix system to be used as part of a biomarker approach in cancer drug trials of MET inhibitors, and then potentially as a companion diagnostic to identify patients likely to respond to the MET inhibitor drugs. The paper entitled "Detection of MET Alterations Using Cell Free DNA and Circulating Tumor Cells from Cancer Patients" has been published in the peer-reviewed journal Cells and can be accessed via https://angl