Cost savings of c. £2.6 million in 2023 rising to c. £4.0 million per annum thereafter

No significant impact on ongoing operations expected

GUILDFORD, SURREY / ACCESSWIRE / October 18, 2022 / ANGLE plc (AIM:AGL)(OTCQX:ANPCY), a world-leading liquid biopsy company, announces that the Board has taken the decision to close the Company's facilities in Toronto, Canada in an orderly wind down. The Company retains its high specification clinical laboratory facility in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, US, as its central hub for North American activities.

As communicated in the Company's Interim Results on 29 September 2022, the Company is committed to tightly controlling costs and focusing on near term commercialisation of its market leading FDA cleared Parsortix^® system for cancer liquid biopsy. The decision to close the Company's Canadian operations has been taken in light of the increasing cost of operating in Canada due to adverse currency movements and recent proposed changes to the UK R&D tax credit rules. The removal of the 33% cash rebate on eligible R&D costs for R&D work undertaken outside the UK will effectively make overseas R&D costs 50% higher going forward, making it much more cost effective to move R&D operations from Canada to the UK.

The actions being taken will reduce costs and extend the cash runway of the business into H2 2024, allowing the Company to continue to focus on making commercial progress. ANGLE expects the closure of the Canadian operations to result in additional one-off closure and settlement cash impacts of c. £0.5 million compared to ongoing operating costs budgeted for the current year. In future years, there will be net cash savings of c. £2.6 million in 2023 rising to c. £4.0 million per annum thereafter.

All research and development will now be centralised in Guildford UK and equipment and assets relocated. Staff at Guildford have the expertise to move forward on all projects and ANGLE does not expect any significant impact on its ongoing operations.

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For Frequently Used Terms, please see the Company's website on https://angleplc.com/investor-relations/glossary/

Notes for editors

About ANGLE plc www.angleplc.com

ANGLE is a world leading liquid biopsy company with sample-to-answer solutions. ANGLE's proven patent protected circulating tumor cell (CTC) harvesting technology is known as the Parsortix^® system.

ANGLE's Parsortix^® system is FDA cleared for its intended use in metastatic breast cancer and is currently the first and only FDA cleared medical device to harvest intact circulating cancer cells from blood.

Intended use
The Parsortix^® PC1 system is an in vitro diagnostic device intended to enrich circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from peripheral blood collected in K₂EDTA tubes from patients diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. The system employs a microfluidic chamber (a Parsortix cell separation cassette) to capture cells of a certain size and deformability from the population of cells present in blood. The cells retained in the cassette are harvested by the Parsortix PC1 system for use in subsequent downstream assays. The end user is responsible for the validation of any downstream assay. The standalone device, as indicated, does not identify, enumerate or characterize CTCs and cannot be used to make any diagnostic/prognostic claims for CTCs, including monitoring indications or as an aid in any disease management and/or treatment decisions.

The Parsortix system enables a liquid biopsy (a simple blood test) to be used to provide the circulating metastatic breast cancer cells to the user in a format suitable for multiple types of downstream analyses. The system is based on a microfluidic device that captures cells based on a combination of their size and compressibility. The system is epitope independent and can capture all phenotypes of CTCs (epithelial, mesenchymal and EMTing CTCs) as well as CTC clusters in a viable form (alive). CTCs harvested from the system enable a complete picture of a cancer to be seen; as being an intact cell they allow DNA, RNA and protein analysis as well as cytological and morphological examination and may provide comparable analysis to a tissue biopsy in metastatic breast cancer. Because CTC analysis is a non-invasive process, unlike tissue biopsy, it can be repeated as often as needed. This is important because cancer develops and changes over time and there is a clear medical need for up-to-date information on the status of a patient's tumor. In addition, the live CTCs harvested by the Parsortix system can be cultured, which offers the potential for testing tumor response to drugs outside the patient.

The Parsortix technology is the subject of 26 granted patents in Europe, the United States, China, Australia, Canada, India, Japan and Mexico with three extensive families of patents are being progressed worldwide.

In the United States, the Parsortix^® PC1 system has received a Class II Classification from FDA for use with metastatic breast cancer patients. FDA clearance is seen as the global gold standard. ANGLE's Parsortix system is the first ever FDA cleared system for harvesting CTCs for subsequent analysis. ANGLE has applied the IVD CE Mark to the same system for the same intended use in Europe.

ANGLE has also completed three separate 200 subject clinical studies under a programme designed to develop an ovarian cancer pelvic mass triage test, with the results showing best in class accuracy (AUC-ROC) of 95.4% with sensitivity of 90% and specificity of 93%. This excellent clinical result demonstrates the utility of cells harvested by the Parsortix system, which the Company believes is the "best sample" for liquid biopsy analysis as it recovers intact, living cancer cells that are involved in the progression of the disease providing prospective information.

ANGLE has established formal collaborations with world-class cancer centres and major corporates such as Abbott, Philips and QIAGEN, and works closely with leading CTC translational research customers. These Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) are working to identify applications with medical utility (clear benefit to patients), and to secure clinical data that demonstrates that utility in patient studies. The body of evidence as to the benefits of the Parsortix system is growing rapidly from our own clinical studies in metastatic breast cancer and ovarian cancer and also from KOLs with 70 peer-reviewed publications and numerous publicly available posters from 31 independent cancer centres, available on our website.

ANGLE has established clinical services laboratories in the UK and the United States to accelerate commercialisation of the Parsortix system and act as demonstrators to support product development. The laboratories offer services globally to pharmaceutical and biotech customers for use of Parsortix in cancer drug trials and, once the laboratories are accredited and tests validated, will provide Laboratory Developed Tests (LDTs) for patient management.

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SOURCE: ANGLE plc