ANGLE plc announced that its Parsortix system has been successfully used to improve the workflows and sensitivity of lymph node analysis in melanoma. The need to investigate the lymph node is crucial in melanoma as patients whose cancer has advanced need supplementary treatment beyond simple excision and late stage melanoma is very aggressive. Fraunhofer have developed a new approach to lymph node analysis using Parsortix which improves the process whilst at the same time reducing costs. key area of investigation in melanoma, and several other cancers including head & neck cancer and lung cancer, is to determine whether the cancer has spread to the lymph nodes to determine the 'Stage' of the cancer and inform treatment decisions. Standard clinical practice is to resect (cut out) the nearest sentinel lymph node to the melanoma. The lymph node is then embedded in FFPE (Formalin-Fixed Paraffin-Embedded) as a tissue biopsy and slices of the FFPE are stained and examined for the presence of metastasis or single DTCs (disseminated tumor cells). If tumor cells are found then the patient is identified as Stage 3 and will be given chemotherapy in addition to having their melanoma excised. This is a key approach in the treatment decision process for melanoma and applied to all patients. However, there are a number of known problems with the current approach, which Fraunhofer has addressed using Parsortix to harvest DTCs from lymph node material. These are as follows: There can be very few DTCs in the lymph node and the FFPE process only investigates a small proportion of the tissue. Consequently Fraunhofer believe that the DTCs can be missed in up to 50% of patients, who are likely to be incorrectly staged. This can be improved by mechanical disaggregation of the lymph node to a single cell suspension allowing analysis of the complete lymph node. The evaluation of the single cell suspension under the microscope requires multiple microscope slides and is time consuming and expensive in terms of laboratory technician time. The Parsortix system can process the entire lymph node harvesting all the DTCs that may be present and reducing the number of false negatives. This greatly enriches the DTCs so that only one microscope slide is needed making it quicker and easier to analyse. Unless there are many DTCs present, with the FFPE approach it can be difficult to undertake molecular analysis to detect the presence of BRAF and other molecular markers. As a consequence, patients that are BRAF positive in the lymph node DTCs may not receive appropriately targeted treatment (BRAF inhibitors such as Vemurafenib developed by Roche Genentech). The Parsortix system provides the DTCs in a form where molecular analysis can be undertaken not just for BRAF but for other relevant genes.