Angle plc , the specialist medtech company, has announced that it has been formally selected for Cancer-ID, the European consortium to validate blood-based biomarkers for cancer.
Cancer-ID is a European consortium funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), with a total budget exceeding €14 million, bringing together 38 partners from 13 countries, and aimed at the establishment of standard protocols for and clinical validation of blood-based biomarkers to enable liquid biopsies to become routine clinical practice.
University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, University of Twente, Bayer AG and Menarini Silicon Biosystems coordinate the consortium, bringing together experts from academic and clinical research to the life sciences industry to provide a unique setting to establish the clinical utility of liquid biopsies.
Angle’s participation in the consortium involves a contribution to the programme in the form of a number of Parsortix instruments and associated consumables for evaluation. The evaluation will assess the suitability of the Parsortix system being adopted as a standard circulating tumour cell (CTC) harvesting system to be used alongside a variety of different molecular analysis techniques in standard operating protocols. Running until 2020, an initial evaluation phase will be followed by a clinical phase to establish the use of liquid biopsies in treating lung and breast cancer. This is intended to provide clinical evidence to support the adoption of liquid biopsy in routine cancer care.
The academic leads of the Cancer-ID consortium are Prof. Klaus Pantel, head of the department of tumor biology at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany, and Prof. Leon Terstappen, head of the department of medical cell biophysics at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. Both are leaders in the field of liquid biopsy and have an impressive track record in both basic research and applied science including device development. The lead companies of the Cancer-ID consortium are Bayer AG and Menarini Silicon Biosystems.
Angle’s founder and chief executive officer, Andrew Newland, said “The Cancer-ID project is focusing on developing and setting standard protocols for the use of CTC liquid biopsies and the clinical validation of blood-based biomarkers. We are delighted to be part of this programme as it offers the Parsortix system the potential to be specified as a standard CTC harvesting system for clinical use in patients with lung cancer and breast cancer in Europe, with the opportunity for collaboration with multiple downstream analysis companies.”
Professor Klaus Pantel, the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, commented “Blood-based analysis of tumor derived cells and nucleic acids offer a novel concept of liquid biopsies to provide real-time information relevant to cancer diagnosis and therapy. The Cancer-ID project fills the substantial gap between basic research focused on novel methods for the detection and characterisation of circulating tumor cells and nucleic acids, and the development of robust validated assays required to bring the liquid biopsy concept into the clinic.”
Dr Thomas Schlange, Biomarker Research, Bayer AG Drug Discovery, added “Cancer-ID is an excellent example of a project in which a public-private partnership enables a collaborative research approach to come up with novel concepts in modern cancer therapy. The consortium brings together a large experienced team of biomarker experts across Europe that extends far beyond the scope of traditional ‘one-on-one’ industry-academia collaborations.”