A new angle on two cancers

SURREY, U.K. & HILDEN, Germany—Liquid biopsy company ANGLE plc has announced it has established a co-marketing agreement with QIAGEN, a world-leading provider of molecular testing solutions with more than 500,000 customers in its Molecular Diagnostics (human healthcare), Applied Testing (forensics, veterinary testing and food safety), Pharma (pharma and biotech companies) and Academia (life-sciences research) divisions. In addition to sharing technologies, the agreement also entails both companies offering the other’s products to its customer base and follows an intensive evaluation of Parsortix by QIAGEN identifying the advantages of the system.

The partnership will seek to leverage the prominent assets of each company. ANGLE is a world-leading liquid biopsy company commercializing a platform technology (Parsortix) that can capture cells circulating in blood, such as cancer cells, even when they are as rare in number as one cell in one billion blood cells, and harvest the cells for analysis. QIAGEN is one of the world’s largest medtech companies with $1.3 billion in revenues.

“We are delighted that Parsortix has been selected by QIAGEN as their label-free CTC [circulating tumor cell] harvesting technology. We believe the ability to offer customers a combination of Parsortix with validated and reliable downstream analysis technologies from a world leader such as QIAGEN facilitates key aspects of the sales cycle and we look forward to working closely together. Partnering is a core part of ANGLE’s strategy to secure widespread adoption of Parsortix right across the market, leveraging the customer base and distribution channels of established players,” states ANGLE’s CEO, Andrew Newland. “[Our] aim is that Qiagen’s sales team will offer Parsortix to their customers as a front end to their own systems,” he adds.

ANGLE will share its Parsortix system for harvesting CTCs with QIAGEN’s liquid biopsy solution portfolio, allowing for more complex science focused initially on prostate and breast cancer research applications. In addition to cancer, the Parsortix technology has the potential for deployment with several other important cell types in the future. The analysis of the cells that can be harvested from patient blood with ANGLE’s Parsortix system has the potential to help deliver personalized cancer care, offering profound improvements in clinical and health economic outcomes in the treatment and diagnosis of various forms of cancer.

QIAGEN is a world-leading provider of liquid biopsy solutions for molecular testing from, as it puts it, “sample to insight.” In 2015, the company introduced the first regulated companion diagnostic assay based on molecular biomarkers from circulating tumor DNA. QIAGEN has created a wide range of strong standards for the processing of liquid biopsy samples, including circulating cell-free DNA, messenger RNA, CTCs, exosomes and others. Many of the solutions offer fully integrated and highly automated workflows spanning from collection through to the purified nucleic acid. The QIAGEN solutions are used in numerous diagnostic and research workflows and often represent gold standards in terms of performance. Such solutions allow liquid biopsies to be easier and less expensive to perform than tissue biopsies and they allow for significantly improved sensitivity, specificity and robustness of liquid biopsies which can be reliably repeated at regular intervals for monitoring of disease progression.

Michael Kazinski, QIAGEN’s senior director of molecular preanalytic technologies, commented: “ANGLE’s Parsortix system is a unique, epitope-independent CTC solution offering easy, automated processing of whole blood to harvest all types of CTCs, including the clinically relevant mesenchymal CTCs, for analysis. It complements very well with our AdnaTest CTC portfolio, now allowing for both phenotypic and molecular characterization of CTCs. The modular combination abilities of this system with QIAGEN’s liquid biopsy-based Sample to Insight offering, including AdnaTest, our targeted RNAseq and single cell solutions—along with our bioinformatics offering—will allow scientists and clinical researchers to significantly advance their research.”

The global increase in cancer to a one in three lifetime incidence is set to drive a multibillion-dollar clinical market. The Parsortix system is designed to be compatible with existing major medtech analytical platforms and to act as a companion diagnostic for pharmas in helping to identify patients who will benefit from a particular drug and then monitoring the drug’s effectiveness.

ANGLE’s Newland sees this as the first in what they hope to be many partnerships, noting, “We want ANGLE’s Parsortix system to become the default system used for harvesting cancer cells from blood no matter what downstream analysis techniques are used subsequently.”