Angle has begun clinical trials for their liquid biopsy technology, known as the Parsortix system. In cancer clinical trials, monitoring tumors to see if the drug being tested is effective often requires fresh tissue biopsies which are invasive in nature. Biomarker-driven cancer clinical studies continue to rise in popularity, leading companies like Angle to seek more patient-friendly and repeatable methods of disease and treatment monitoring.
The Parsortix system is a cell separation technology which enables a simple blood test to deliver the cells of interest in a manner appropriate for several types of downstream analyses. The technology is based around a microfluidic device which identifies and captures cells after determining their size and compressibility.
The system is able to capture all types of intact circulating tumor cells (CTCs), which enables a more complete idea of the cancer to be seen. It also allows for the analysis of DNA, RNA, and proteins, and can hopefully provide equivalent analysis to the more invasive tissue biopsy.
Given the more patient-friendly approach of a liquid biopsy, this kind of CTC analysis can be carried out repeatedly. This makes it an ideal method for longitudinal monitoring, particularly in the case of cancer as these diseases change and develop over time.
Furthermore, Parsortix may enable researchers to harvest and culture live CTCs for study outside of the body, including clinical research of drug efficacy outside of patients' bodies.
The clinical trial company has set out on a Phase III contract, and told Clinical trials Arena that they had already enrolled a “number” of patients and will carry out testing with the Parsortix system at various stages in the clinical protocol.
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