Liquid biopsy company, ANGLE, has announced the launch of its Portrait Flex CTC assay to advance personalised cancer care.

Circulating tumour cells (CTCs) can be one of the first indicators of early cancer metastasis and the Portrait Flex assay will be used as a tool to detect the early stages of aggressive cancers.

The CTCs are collected by ANGLE’s Parsortix technology and fed through the Portrait Flex CTC assay to analyse and characterise the samples with immunofluorescence staining for epithelial, mesenchymal, blood lineage and nuclear markers. It also has the capability to add extra biomarkers personalised to the patient.

ANGLE CEO Andrew Newland said: “To support adoption of its technology by adding “content”, ANGLE has been developing a menu of imaging assays and molecular assays to analyse the CTCs harvested by the Parsortix system. These assays support both ANGLE’s pharma services business and product business for third-party customers.”

According to ANGLE, data from an analysis of 16 metastatic breast cancer patients’ clinical samples, identified CTCs in 81% of the group. It also showed that 38.5% of the CTC-positive patients have CTC with high HER2 levels highlighting the capability to assess current HER2 status in breast cancer patients. Half of the CTC group showed a mesenchymal only phenotype, while the others showed a mixed phenotype.

ANGLE chief commercial officer, Brett Swansinger said: “This service, provided by a highly experienced team, can provide valuable data for clinical trials and contribute to the advancement in personalized cancer care.”

The CTC assay comes as part of ANGLE’s Onc-ADaPT GCP-compliant laboratories and is run by a team with over 10 years’ experience in CTC analysis.