Device improves decision-making in breast cancer therapy

Angle, a specialist medical technology company, has signed a collaboration agreement with the University of Southern California (USC) Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center to investigate the clinical use of Angle’s Parsortix cell separation system for making decisions in treating breast cancer. 

The research collaboration will be led by Dr Julie E. Lang, Associate Professor of Surgery. Metastasis is responsible for virtually all breast cancer related deaths. American Society for Clinical Oncology guidelines now call for the biopsy of metastatic sites (the secondary cancer locations) for biomarker testing to guide decision making for systemic therapy. These metastatic biopsies are invasive, often requiring surgery, and therefore can cause the patient considerable additional complications. Furthermore, such metastatic biopsies can be expensive and may delay aspects of the patient’s ongoing treatment. 

Over the last four months, the team at USC Norris has evaluated the performance of Angle’s Parsortix system and will now use it to harvest circulating tumour cells (CTCs) for analysis.  As a result of its previous work, the team has already developed core processes needed to undertake RNA analysis of the breast cancer CTCs once harvested by the Parsortix equipment.