ANGLE raises £20m, eyes opportunity in immunotherapy trials

Liquid biopsy company ANGLE has raised £20m through a conditional placing on the London Stock Exchange which will be used to expand commercial opportunities.

ANGLE’s Parsortix system detects and captures circulating tumour cells (CTCs) in blood for subsequent analysis. The company believes there is huge potential for its use in assessing patient response to immunotherapy drugs.

“This raise enables us to set up two clinical laboratories for pharma services and processing patient samples. It also enables us to do some development of new assays, particularly for PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitors,” ANGLE CEO, Andrew Newland told pharmaphorum.

A study by the Laboratory of Translational Oncology, School of Medicine, University of Crete, demonstrated the system can predict patient response to immunotherapy. Results showed the detection of Indolamine-2,3-dioxygenase IDO and CTCs, particularly the IDO+/PD-L1- CTC subpopulation harvested using Parsortix, was significantly associated with reduced progression-free survival and overall survival in NSCLC patients treated with anti-PD-1 agents.

“The immunotherapy market is currently generating revenue of $22bn and growing at 40% per year. With thousands of active clinical trials focused on PDL checkpoint 1 inhibitors, we believe every single one of those trials could benefit from using Parsortix for CTC analysis and PDL1 expression,” Newland said. “This is an exciting opportunity as this market is not dependent on us receiving clearance.”

ANGLE submitted a full De Novo FDA application for Parsortix in September. The system could be the first medical device to receive FDA clearance for harvesting intact CTCs from the blood of metastatic breast cancer patients for subsequent analysis.

According to Newland, the £20m raise attracted more US investors as the appetite for liquid biopsy increases. “There is a consensus amongst US investment bankers that the liquid biopsy market is going to be over $100 billion a year per year in the US alone. We are seeing much more interest from US investors because they see us as a very undervalued opportunity in this space. They see we have solutions that can expand what liquid biopsy companies are doing and we don’t have to compete with them.”

The liquid biopsy space has exploded this year as companies signed billion-dollar deals to strengthen their market positions. Illumina announced a $8 billion agreement to reacquire former spinout Grail and Exact Sciences entered a $2.15 billion deal to buy Thrive.