NEW YORK – Liquid biopsy company Angle on Friday announced that a £750,000 ($936,435) grant from Prostate Cancer UK will fund an investigator-initiated study to assess the ability of its Parsortix circulating tumor cells blood test to predict prostate cancer recurrence.
The trial, run out of Barts Cancer Institute at Queen Mary University of London, will follow 200 men with localized prostate cancer who will undergo radical prostatectomy surgery. The researchers will track the patients, starting before they receive surgery and then afterwards for five years. They will take blood samples at regular intervals for analysis with Parsortix to assess how well the test predicts which patients' cancers will come back after surgery based on the presence of CTCs.
"If our hypothesis is correct, we hope that this blood test will become the future standard of care for these patients," Yong-Jie Lu, lead researcher of the study and professor of molecular oncology at Barts Cancer Institute, said in a statement. "Patients with localized prostate cancer will be treated more efficiently and in a more personalized way, rather than surgically removing the prostate and just waiting to see what happens. Doctors will have more information about whether the cancer has really spread or not, based on this test, meaning patients won't be over- or undertreated."
The Parsortix platform identifies the presence of mesenchymal circulating tumor cells and circulating tumor cell clusters in peripheral blood to predict recurrence. Barts Cancer Institute researchers independently designed the study, and they also sought out the funding from Prostate Cancer UK. Angle will provide researchers with Parsortix instruments, cassettes, and reagents.
"Our aim is that the Parsortix system will be widely adopted by third parties … to develop many and varied uses of the Parsortix system to support cancer patients," Angle CEO Andrew Newland said in a statement.
Angle, based in the UK, previously worked with Barts Cancer Institute to validate that Parsortix could identify circulating tumor cells in prostate cancer patients.