- Company secures follow-up contract worth up to $1.2 million
- Ongoing discussions with multiple potential new customers
- First mover advantage in attractive liquid biopsy market
Biopsy technology company Angle (AGL:AIM) has won a follow-up contract with its first large scale pharma services customer it announced in April 2021, proving it can generate repeat business from large pharma companies.
The customer has over $1 billion of annual revenues and ‘numerous’ cancer drugs in development. The contract is expected to generate up to $1.2 million of revenues over a multi-year period.
Angle founder and chief executive Andrew Newland commented: ‘The additional contract from our first large-scale pharma customer, as well as ongoing discussions with multiple potential new customers, validates ANGLE's belief that longitudinal monitoring of CTCs is a highly attractive proposition for the pharma industry looking for new insights in cancer drug trials.’
The shares demonstrated some defensiveness and were unchanged at 93p against a weak UK market, down 1% on Wednesday.
PARSORTIX ADVANTAGES
Like the original contract the customer is using Angle’s clinical laboratories in the UK and US to analyse circulating tumour cells (CTCs) and CTC clusters, captured and harvested by the company’s proprietary Parsortix cell separation system.
Parsortix was granted marketing authorisation by the US Food and Drug Administration in May 2022. Initially the authorisation is restricted to use in metastatic breast cancer patients, but it could be expanded to cover other cancers over time.
Investment bank Berenberg noted that the clearance is the first ever for a system that extracts cancer cells for subsequent analysis.
It argues that this gives Angle a significant head start in one of the most attractive niches within cancer diagnostics.
The system has many advantages compared with taking tissue biopsies.
It eliminates the many associated side effects and allows for several samples to be analysed before, during and after drug intervention. This is not possible with tissue biopsies.
BUILDING ON SUCCESS
Today’s announced contract relates to the successful progression of a smaller phase one study. Angle said it anticipates ‘that this further Phase Ib study, if successful, could progress to larger Phase II studies and, potentially, much larger Phase III studies.’
