Strategy and business model (QCA Principle 1)

ANGLE is a world-leading liquid biopsy company commercialising a platform technology that can capture cells circulating in blood, such as CTCs, intact living cancer cells, even when they are as rare in number as one cell in one billion blood cells, and harvest the cells for analysis.

ANGLE’s cell separation technology is called the Parsortix system and is the subject of granted patents in multiple jurisdictions. The system is based on a microfluidic device that captures cells based on a combination of their size and compressibility.

The analysis of the cells that can be harvested from patient blood with ANGLE’s Parsortix system has the potential to deliver profound improvements in clinical and health economic outcomes in the treatment and diagnosis of various forms of cancer.

ANGLE’s vision is to secure widespread adoption of the Parsortix technology by providing CTCs as the “best sample” for analysis in the emerging multi-US$ billion liquid biopsy market. To drive commercialisation, ANGLE has established both a product business and a services business with differing regulatory pathways, routes to market and near and longer-term revenue potential.

1. Product business area

ANGLE has developed the Parsortix system including instruments and one-time use cassettes that can be sold to third-party laboratories for their use in research, pharmaceutical development or clinical use. To enable customers to carry out downstream analysis of the Parsortix harvest, ANGLE will also offer assay kits for cell imaging, use protocols and data packets for molecular platforms and algorithms for clinical interpretation of results.

2. Services business area

ANGLE has established clinical laboratories in the UK and United States as accelerators and demonstrators that have the capability and required quality systems to process patient samples and offer validated clinical tests using the Parsortix system. The laboratories, in Guildford, UK and Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, United States, are being used to provide services to pharma and biotech customers running clinical trials (pharma services) and will be able to offer laboratory developed tests (LDTs) for patient management as a first step towards product roll out of tests.

Both business areas are supported by a growing body of published evidence from leading cancer centres showing the utility of the system through peer-reviewed publications, scientific data and clinical research evidence, highlighting a wide range of potential applications.