EKF Diagnostics and Angle announce liquid biopsy collaboration

EKF Diagnostics has announced that it will be collaborating with Angle to investigate the potential benefits of combining their technologies for use in liquid biopsy applications.

The project aims to investigate the combination of Angle's Parsortix circulating tumour cell (CTC) harvesting platform with EKF Molecular's PointMan DNA enrichment technology as a liquid biopsy method.

Initially set to be applied to colorectal cancer analysis, the principle could be expanded to other cancer types later on. If successful, the resulting simple blood test could enable the investigation of unexpected ultra-low level mutations in a patient's cancer for personalised care.

CTCs will be harvested from patients' blood samples using Angle's Parsortix system, before being analysed using PointMan DNA enrichment technology to identify genetic variation in the cancer cells.

Andy Webb, chief executive officer of EKF Molecular Diagnostics, said: "The high purity of the CTCs harvested by Angle's Parsortix system and the absence of immunomagnetic beads gives us confidence that [PointMan] will be effective with the Parsortix harvested CTCs, providing rapid molecular information to the oncologist."

EKF is a leading manufacturer of products for point of care, central laboratory and molecular diagnostic applications, which are used in more than 100 countries worldwide.