NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The UK technology development firm Angle said today that Parsortix, a cancer diagnostics company in which it owns a 90 percent stake, will partner with the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research, based at the University of Manchester, UK, to develop circulating tumor cell-based technology for lung cancer patients.
Under the two-year agreement, Parsortix and The Paterson Institute's Clinical and Pharmacology Group, or CEP, which specializes in developing and validating biomarkers for CTCs, will partner to apply that expertise in research that could advance a CTC capture device that Parsortix is developing and plans to commercialize.
The partners will pursue several goals, including cancer blood studies to independently confirm the performance and optimize the design of the Parsortix device, and to test it for use with cancer biomarkers. They also will seek to evaluate the Parsortix CTC device in relation to other similar platforms, and perform in-depth studies to support regulatory approval submissions for CE marking in Europe and Food and Drug Administration approval in the US.
The Parsortix technology is a separation platform for isolating rare cells in extremely low numbers from other cells in blood.
"The Parsortix cell separation technology offers the potential for improved capture of CTCs from cancer patient blood and, since it does not rely on antibody affinity capture, has the potential to be both more effective and more widely applicable than existing techniques," Paterson Institute CEP Group Leader Caroline Dive said in a statement.
"We hope to be able to recover viable CTCs from the Parsortix device and be able to detect useful predictive and/or pharmacodynamic biomarkers, which will enable both an improvement in patient treatment and better targeted, more effective clinical trials of new cancer drugs in the future,” she said.
Angle said that the partnership with the Paterson Institute will help Parsortix to develop new applications for its diagnostic device and to market it to the research market first and to for clinical use in cancer care later.
"We believe that this research partnership will significantly help us to optimize our cancer diagnostic product and bring it to market as quickly as possible," added Angle Founder and CEO Andrew Newland.