EKF Molecular Diagnostics has entered into collaboration with specialist medtech company ANGLE plc, to investigate the combination of ANGLE’s Parsortix circulating tumor cell (CTC) harvesting platform with EKF Molecular’s PointMan DNA enrichment technology as a liquid biopsy. If successful, the resulting simple blood test could enable the investigation of unexpected ultra-low level mutations in a patient’s cancer for personalized cancer care.
The collaboration will initially work on colorectal cancer and then expand to cover other cancer types. CTCs will be harvested from cancer patients’ blood using ANGLE’s Parsortix system and then analyzed using PointMan DNA enrichment technology to identify genetic variation in the cancer.
Both EKF Molecular Diagnostics and ANGLE believe that the combination of the Parsortix system with PointMan technology may be advantageous for two reasons. Firstly, the PointMan system preferentially amplifies variant sequences of interest whilst suppressing amplification of the wild type i.e. normal DNA. As a result, it has the potential to identify all mutations in gene sequences associated with clinical utility of targeted cancer therapies. In contrast, competing genetic analysis systems generally amplify only those areas which may be predicted to be mutant and therefore may miss unexpected mutations.
Secondly, PointMan is highly sensitive with the ability to work with very low levels of target material, potentially as low as one CTC. The high purity of the Parsortix harvest (low white blood cell contamination) and its epitope independence may enable the combined system to be widely deployed across different cancer types and stages of disease.
If the collaboration is successful, EKF Molecular Diagnostics and ANGLE will explore ways to offer their respective systems as a combined solution addressing first the pharmaceutical drug trial and research use market and then, as patient data are developed, the clinical market.
Learn more on the EKF website
