In 2020, 11.7% of all cancers diagnosed were female breast cancer, making it the most common cancer worldwide. One in seven women in the UK will develop breast cancer in their lifetime.
Angle Plc LON:AGL is a Guildford-based, AIM-listed biotech company and it announced this week that it has agreed a development partnership with Israeli cell imaging and analysis company, Bio-view [TLV:BIOV] to develop a circulating tumour cell human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) assay for breast cancer. Should the partnership bear fruit, the new assay could enable clinicians to access a fast test that can measure HER2 status in breast cancer patients.
Hereditary mutation
HER2 is a gene that makes a protein found on the surface of all breast cells. It is involved in normal cell growth. Genes are the basic units of heredity, passed down from a mother and father and in cases of breast cancer, genetics is one of the contributing factors to the development of a cancer, with up to 10% of people who develop breast cancer having a genetic mutation (often BRCA1 and BRCA2) passed on from their parents. HER2-low breast cancer accounts for 55% of all breast cancer cases whereas HER2-positive cancer accounts for 25% of cases according to Angle.
The partnership presents, as Angle CEO, Andrew Newland says: “a major market opportunity” as each company has relevant FDA product clearances for both parts of their collaboration, expediting the pathway to commercialisation of a join-developed assay.
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In a statement Angle said: “This would be the only product-based solution on the market for this purpose leveraging both companies’ previous FDA product clearances […] the development phase is estimated to take around a year to complete with the assay development work generating around GBP1.2m of revenues for Angle.”
Angle was a spin-off from a research project from the University of Cambridge founded in 1994. The company’s initial focus was on developing technologies for the detection of cancer cells in the blood. Angle listed on the London Stock Exchange in December 2004.
The Surrey-based life sciences company’s shares opened at 18p this morning (20th April) and has offered a -63.8% year-to-date return and a -82.3% one-year return, with its shares ranging between 15.85p and 163.75p.
The company has a market capitalisation of GBP46.25.
The company’s shares have been disappointing, but the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors have a notoriously long development lead time from initial research through testing and peer review to commercialisation. An then there is the marketing process in trying to sell your product to ‘Big Pharma’.
The work that Angle has concentrated on – identifying cancer cell released into the blood from developing tumours in the body – especially in prostrate, ovarian and breast cancers, is really important as it can capture the type of cancer developing and personalise patient care and target medication. Cancers also use these free-floating cells to metastasize, or spread to other parts of the body, creating secondary tumours in other organs.
Angle’s Parsortix product captures and harvest the circulating tumour cells from the blood and can be used for diagnosis, prognosis, mutational analysis and drug selection, drug development, assessment of treatment effectiveness, and remission monitoring. The company assesses the market for its products to be in excess of GBP8bn a year. The system can also be used in pre-natal foetal medicine.
FDA approval
Last year was a good year for the biotech company, as it gained FDA clearance for the world’s first system to harvest circulating tumour cells from blood, and made progress in its ovarian cancer research. This year could be better, as with FDA approval for its base system, it could be a market leader in the liquid biopsy market and it is getting closer to the commercialisation of Parsortix. Further partnership with other developers globally are promising.
The company has been to market a number of times to raise more capital – which undoubtedly would affect share appreciation – raising GBP20.1m in July 2022. The company has also been affected by changes in research funding and tax breaks, during the global financial downturn, closing its Canadian operations as R&D credits in the UK made research in Britain more cost effective.
Angle hopes to have made cost savings of GBP2.6m this year and GBP4m a year subsequently following the wind-down of its Canada operations. The company has no debt and around GBP32m cash banked and is expecting revenues of more than GBP1m, but still expects to make a GBP22m loss following the Canadian close-down. Half-a-million pounds of revenue was not forthcoming in 2022, and will now be logged in 2023, due to delays outside the company’s control and a slow-down as a result of the economic conditions, forcing customers to delay or reduce purchases, but has in the year-to-date seen a number of orders confirmed, as confidence slowly seeps back into the market.
The company expects revenue to grow strongly, but below current market expectations, but has been developing a growing network of global distribution partners. Pre-commercial pharma is a very difficult market to call. Until the product or drug hits the shelves, it exists on a knife-edge as if the product doesn’t pass muster, all the research time and capital is binned (although that is quite a pithy analysis). Once a product is approved and has achieves commercialisation, the stock flies. As an investor it is a timing decision, as successful biotech companies go from cheap to expensive stocks quite quickly, and right now, with shares as cheap as they have been for several years, there might be a buying angle in this stock now.
Angle Plc will publish its preliminary results for the year ending 31st December 2022 tomorrow.