Hello, welcome to the ANGLE plc preliminary results conference call. My name is Alex, I'll be coordinating the call today. If you'd like to ask a question, please dial into the conference call via telephone and press Star followed by One on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, you may press Star two. I'll now hand over to your host, Andrew Newland, Chief Executive Officer to begin. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to ANGLE's prelims presentation, in relation to our year end of 31st of December, 2022. I'm delighted to be giving you an update on the company's progress. As everybody knows, we made tremendous progress during 2022, with our FDA clearance and a number of other key milestones for the company which were achieved. The achievements in 2022 are the foundations that we believe will build a major business to deliver major returns for all our shareholders. At the same time, transform the cancer care for patients. Today's presentation is quite detailed, more detailed than usual. It is already on our website, so you'll be able to look at the detailed slides. Obviously, I won't have enough...
When you see them, you'll see that I won't have enough time to go through all of those slides in detail. We did want to get the information out to shareholders, which describes a lot of tremendous work that's been done post FDA clearance in terms of key steps to drive value creation and to describe the process by which ANGLE is delivering value for our shareholders. The word I'd like to have people start thinking about is content. Content means, in our sense, means ways to utilize the Parsortix system to deliver specific applications and outcomes. That's the actual key factor in the success of the business. I like to think of the Parsortix system as being a little analogous to a smartphone, for example, the iPhone.
The iPhone is very useful for making various telephone calls and so on. What's really taken off is all the applications that is available now. That's what I mean by content. We're working on a whole series of different applications for the Parsortix system, some of which I'm going to explain in this presentation. Just by way of background, we all know that the Parsortix system is focused on recovering intact living cancer cells from patient blood. The reason that is needed is that cancer changes, well cancer between patients is very different, and it also changes over time.
That means that there's a need to do repeat biopsies in order to assess the current patient status and what treatment decisions should be made for those patients. Of course, you can't repeat the tissue biopsy because once the tissue's been cut out, it's no longer there for a second investigation. Patients at the moment don't have the benefit of repeat biopsies of their cancer to guide their treatment. We are pioneering a new approach, which is to recover cancer cells for examination and investigation from patient blood. It's easily repeatable and minimally invasive procedure, just a simple blood test. The reason that is technically challenging is that there are very few cancer cells in the blood. Perhaps only one cancer cell in 1 billion blood cells.
What we have achieved with our now FDA-cleared platform is the first ever system FDA cleared for successfully recovering those cancer cells so that they can be analyzed. That opens up a whole wide range of different potential uses from the early diagnosis of cancer through to treatment selection and monitoring cancer patients who are in remission. That's the backdrop to what we've been working on. In terms of our achievements in 2022, this really truly was a breakthrough year for ANGLE, both in regulatory, clinical and commercial terms. The major step forward that we achieved with our FDA product clearance, the only product ever been cleared by FDA for harvesting cancer cells for subsequent analysis following 6.5 years of effort, was achieved during the year.
We followed that with outstanding ovarian cancer results, which demonstrated a real-world use of this technology, in this case, for the detection of ovarian cancer, which outperformed all current standard of care approaches to that. Thirdly, we established and built out our clinical laboratories and established our pharma services business, which is now gathering momentum with repeat business secured from existing customers and new customers being signed. All of those things were major achievements. We also signed a prostate cancer deal with Solaris Health, the largest chain of urology clinics in the United States, which is now progressing very well with prostate cancer studies, which I will describe as we go through.
The many different achievements in 2022, which I think gives us the foundation to build a very substantial business for the future. In terms of what's been going on since then, I think it's really important to highlight the fact that we're making tremendous progress in 2023. We know now that the Q1 2023 revenues are strongly ahead of the prior year, and I'll give some more information on that shortly. Both products and services revenue are strongly ahead of the prior year. We've succeeded in signing an additional pharma services customer, Crescendo Biologics, and we've got multiple other such customers progressing.
We have signed a deal this year, very, very recently, just announced, to develop a HER2 CTC assay with BioView as a collaborator, and we will talk through that. That's a highly encouraging deal for future development and generates early revenues for Angle at the same time. We have the prostate cancer pilot study on track with headline results anticipated around the year-end. We have been working on assessing third-party molecular platforms. Now, what that means is using the molecular platforms developed by other parties to analyze the cancer cells from Parsortix, and we're getting highly encouraging results, and I will talk more about that as well. We believe that this is the molecular analysis of the Parsortix harvest offers tremendous opportunity to generate significant revenues and part corporate partnerships.
We also have a pipeline of assays in development, adding content for both services and products. What I would like to emphasize here is that the management team is extremely confident in delivering strong growth in 2023, and we see a very clear path to a large-scale business opportunity for ANGLE in the future. In terms of the financial performance, this information was outlined in our business update in January. It's very much consistent with that. The revenue line, at GBP 1 million, was somewhat below where we'd hoped to be, as a number of expected sales were delayed or impacted by the wider market backdrop as previously described.
We're very, very pleased to say that momentum is building in 2023, and we've seen some strong growth in Q1. The quarter one results are strongly up on the previous year. In fact, the quarter one for 2023 revenues already exceed the revenues for the whole of the first half of the previous year, 2022. That's a good start to the year. There's a lot more to be done, and we are aiming to see that momentum building still further. In terms of the cash position of the company, as described in January, cash position was maintained at around GBP 32 million .
The key point here is that we, with the number of actions that we've taken, we have a cash position, funded through significantly into the second half of 2024. The company has the cash resources in place to deliver on its current plans. Right. Now, this is a new slide. What we're hoping to do here is to highlight the commercial strategy that we're adopting. We have a very clear commercial strategy. There are 2 business areas. There's the product business and the services business. In simple terms, we see the services business as being a nearer term opportunity to generate revenue and an opportunity to demonstrate the way that the system can be used.
The product business is a tremendous opportunity for ANGLE because we can sell the Parsortix system and consumables to all different hospitals and research labs and clinical labs around the world. They can adopt this, and we have a very leveraged approach to how we generate commercial revenues. What we're seeking to do is to enable the entire industry to adopt the Parsortix system and themselves to develop different uses. There are some key commercialization drivers, five in total, that are necessary for success. The first one is to get regulatory clearance. Now, clearly, we have already achieved that with our FDA and also CE mark and U.K. MHRA in place.
The second is to develop assays to provide end-to-end solutions, such as the imaging and molecular uses of the Parsortix harvested cells, which I'm now calling content, and I'll describe that in more detail. A lot of work has been done on that post-FDA clearance. Thirdly, is to develop various clinical studies to show in real-world conditions the value of doing the analysis of the cancer cells. The ovarian cancer studies are example of that. Prostate is now running, and we've got multiple other clinical studies in-hand. Fourthly, in order to achieve the scale of commercialization that we're targeting, we want to partner with large companies in this space and give them the opportunity to utilize Parsortix system.
In that way, we can leverage their sales channels and fund the commercialization of the system. There's multiple things going on in terms of the partnership area. The announcement earlier this week with BioView is just the starter for 10. Finally, the fifth area is reimbursement. Reimbursement means getting the various healthcare organizations in the world to agree to pay for the use of the Parsortix test, and that can be a lengthy process. We've already started work on this, and we're making a number of good steps in the right direction in that. We've got a very clear commercialization strategy. We've clearly focused on the necessary steps to get this system widely adopted in the marketplace. What does that actually mean?
Well, it means that we're seeking to build a substantial business. I think that the numbers shown on this slide are actually quite conservative. In the near term, we see revenue potential for ANGLE of GBP 50 million in pharma services. That is utilizing the existing capability and capacity that we've already got in place. We're building out that pharma services business and seeing success already in that area. We're soon going to be building out a services business in laboratory-developed tests. That means offering clinical tests for patients from our own clinical labs, and that has a revenue potential we can see of GBP 100 million. Obviously the big market opportunity is selling products.
That's a longer-term activity, and obviously it provides a ongoing long-term franchise for the business. We see plenty of opportunities of building out a business into the region of 500 million GBP per annum. The picture on the side is purely illustrative, but it shows how those different parts of the business can add together over time. As I mentioned earlier, the services business is designed to drive the products business. The products business is very high margin. We have third-party manufacturers, so we can scale without the need for further investment. The services business generates early revenues and indicates to others how they can use this system to benefit patients and obviously, generate returns for themselves. In terms of...
I'm going to discuss now the products business and also the services business, but first the products business. To be successful in the products business, you need regulatory clearance. We've successfully achieved that. It's worth re-emphasizing the fact that not only are we the only FDA-cleared product for harvesting cancer cells from patient blood for subsequent analysis, and our clearance is in metastatic breast cancer, but the system can be used across 24 different solid tumor cancer types. Not only are we the only one that's FDA cleared, but we're not aware of anybody else who's even in process with the FDA. That gives us, we estimate at least a six-year market advantage to any competition that might come through.
We've yet to see any competition with a system anywhere near as good as the Parsortix system. We've got the regulatory clearance in place. We now need to get key opinion leaders, KOLs, to drive recognition and adoption of this system. That's an established process with a medical diagnostic product. You need the leaders in the field to start using it and talking about it. We have put in place multiple different leading cancer centers. These are four top cancer centers from the United States who have got Parsortix systems in their labs, and they're using them right now to develop evidence to support the use of our system. That's a key part of the commercialization strategy, to have key opinion leaders supporting the use of the instrument.
Very new actually to ANGLE, and been built out substantially since the FDA clearance, is the establishment of a number of distribution partners across the world. The idea here is that this gives us the opportunity to have a much larger sales force available to sell the product in countries where obviously ANGLE does not have a footprint and does not have any local presence. We've selected distribution partners who we've signed in numerous different countries, based on their existing sales of oncology-related products and their contacts with potential customers, and also based on their ability to provide service and support to the product.
Most of these distributors are not only selling product for us, but they can provide the servicing, and they can provide the support to the customer to implement the product. That's very, very important to ANGLE. This is leveraging more sales capacity for the business. We expect to see towards the end of this year and then heavily into next year, sales coming through from these distribution partners. In addition to this, by the way, we have substantially strengthened our commercial and sales team internally, both to manage these distributors, but also to make direct sales alongside of them. We'll be putting content down this distribution channel. They're currently selling the Parsortix system and the Parsortix cassettes, but soon they'll be selling Portrait+ kits for immunofluorescence.
Portrait+ PD-L1 kits, again for immunofluorescence imaging. We'll be providing them with Landscape Plus molecular protocols on how to use the Parsortix system with established third-party molecular platforms. The key idea here is that these distributors are selling already for a number of very large companies, their molecular PCR, digital PCR, Next-Generation Sequencing platforms for molecular analysis of cancer cells. If we can generate protocols showing how to use those same systems with the output of Parsortix, then they can sell Parsortix in alongside of these other systems. That's a key part of our commercialization strategy for the product, is to align our Parsortix sample with the existing methods of analysis that are in the market.
Moving across to the services side, we have got our clinical laboratories set up. They've got capacity to run between GBP 50 million and GBP 100 million sterling revenues of analysis of samples, and we can build that out still further quite easily if we choose to do so. We're about two years in to the original establishment of those laboratories. We've now hired a lot of additional staff. We've got a lot of equipment, and they're in a well-positioned place to deal with the pharma services and then eventually with clinical services. We're finding that our customers are very happy with the service that is provided, as illustrated by the fact that we're now getting a lot of repeat business coming from existing customers.
I believe that our laboratories are world-leading liquid biopsy laboratories operating at a standard higher than any other labs in the world because of their ability to utilize the Parsortix system. It opens up new forms of analysis which cannot be done in other labs. Critical point here, though, is that we're not aiming to centralize all work in our labs. Quite the opposite. We want these labs to be the accelerators and demonstrators, and we're seeking to encourage clinical laboratories, and of course, contract research organizations with laboratories around the world to copy this. We will provide them with a Parsortix system, training, and protocols so that they can do so. That's the way that we can leverage these laboratories.
In terms of the pharma services offering, the clinical labs have given us the opportunity to build out a highly successful pharma services business, which is uniquely differentiated. And it adds value to the pharmaceutical company's drug trials because it's possible now, using a Parsortix system, to analyze the patient's status before, during, and after the time when they have the drug. That's something that's new. And a lot of the analysis that the pharma companies are interested in is looking at proteins on the cancer cells, and those proteins can be the target for their drug. And now that's very significant because you can't look at proteins without getting hold of the actual cancer cell.
You can't do that from a tissue biopsy because the tissue biopsy can only be done once, and you can't do it from the alternative approach for liquid biopsy, which is fragments of dead cells, because you have to have an intact cell. We're offering them something that they genuinely can't get from other methodologies than CTC analysis. We've secured a good number of customers. We had four customers last year. Three of those four have now signed repeat contracts with us, and the fourth one is in discussions. We've added a new customer this year, and we've got multiple others in discussion to be added. These contracts can be high-margin contracts, and they can be significant.
Each contract can be worth over $1 million in its own right, and the margins can be in excess of 75%. We've added to the ability that we have to analyze these samples an assay development capability. This sets us far apart from other laboratories because we can actually develop bespoke assays for the pharmaceutical company. They can tell us which protein their drug is targeting, and we can develop that specifically for them. Essentially, they pay us to develop that capability, which they then use in their own clinical trials, but we get the opportunity to own that afterwards, and we can offer it to other parties. In terms of the content that we're developing, there are two main areas. There's Portrait and there's Landscape. Portrait means imaging.
What that means is getting the cancer cells and putting them onto a microscope slide and staining them with antibodies to determine the presence and phenotype of cancer cell, and then staining them for other proteins of interest. That imaging work is branded by ANGLE under the term Portrait. We've got various different assays, Portrait Flex, Portrait PD-L1, and so on. These are all developed by ANGLE. We put substantial effort and resources into developing the assays that are listed on the site there. The second area is molecular. We've branded that as Landscape.
The various different things that we can do with molecular, we can do DNA mutational analysis of the cancer cells, we can do RNA molecular analysis, gene expression analysis of the cancer cells. In our product business, what we're seeking to do is to develop product kits, reagents, and protocols which can then be sold by the distributors to clinical laboratory customers. We're giving the clinical laboratory customer access to the Parsortix system to recover the cancer cells from patient blood, we're giving them product kits and protocols for how they analyze those cells. That content is critical because getting the cancer cells is only the first part. It enables everything else, they still need to know how to actually analyze those cells.
There's been a lot of effort on the product kits, reagents, and protocols development. In our services business, it's slightly easier because we're the ones running the tests. The productization is not needed. What we're doing there is verifying and validating assays in our laboratories. We're doing direct development. We've already done direct development work in our R&D labs. We transfer that to our clinical labs, who verify the performance. Once they've done that, they can offer that to pharmaceutical and biotech customers. The key point here is that we've been doing a tremendous amount of work since FDA on developing the content that can be sold alongside of the Parsortix.
Here you have on this slide a representation of the different assays which are expected to come out in the near term, over the next 12 months. It's important to recognize that we already have tests in our clinical lab that we're offering the pharma and biotech companies. What we're doing here is we've improved and we're launching new tests. On the imaging side, which is the Portrait ones on the top of this slide, the Portrait Flex is a method for staining the cancer cells and identifying the phenotype of the cancer cells. The Flex part means that we have designed this assay so that we can add additional protein markers.
If, for example, as one of our major customers has done, the customer requests the measurement of a DNA damage repair protein such as gamma-H2AX, that's something that we can put into the Flex channel. That's where the pharma can define what it is that they want. We've gone the next step with Portrait PD-L1 to actually use the Flex channel for programmed death ligand-one, which is a fundamental target for immunotherapy drugs. That has been developed by ANGLE, and is gonna be launched in Q3. We've also developed a DNA damage repair assay, which was designed for one of our customers. This is really important for PARP inhibitors. As announced earlier, we're working on Portrait HER2, which HER2 is a key protein in breast cancer measurement.
On the molecular side, we're working on Landscape products. The first one's going to be in measuring EGFR, which is a DNA mutation, with multiple different variants that need to be understood in lung cancer particularly, but in multiple other cancers as well. That's Landscape EGFR. That, and the next one, KRAS, and the next one, PIK3CA, are specific DNA mutations where there are reagent kits available from QIAGEN. We're utilizing the QIAGEN digital PCR platform for the purposes of those assays. Towards the end of the year, we anticipate coming out with RNA digital PCR panels, but they will be tailored for our ovarian and prostate cancer samples. I'm going to motor through some of these other slides.
There's a lot of detail in here, which can be studied in at your leisure, and we'll answer questions in the future. The Portrait Flex I mentioned, it's designed for monitoring patients who are in cancer drug trials. It enables, with the Flex capability, a bespoke development for each pharmaceutical company. What you can see on this slide is that it's a very high-performance assay. It leverages both our CTC capability to get hold of mesenchymal cancer cells, and those are particularly relevant for clinical significance measures. It's something that is of real interest to all customers, the fact that we get high performance from mesenchymal CTC systems, 'cause the legacy systems failed to do that.
In terms of the DDR assays, this was developed as a bespoke. DDR, DNA damage repair. This was developed as a bespoke assay for one of our key pharma customers, that customer has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to develop PARP inhibitors, and they have a large-scale collaboration with Merck. This customer paid for the development of these assays. We made money whilst we were developing them. Now, of course, we can offer them to other customers as well. The customers accepted these assays meet their requirements, and we're about to move into large-scale clinical trials with them, utilizing these assays. It's measuring two critical proteins relating to DNA damage repair, which can be used to assess whether the drug is being impacting positively for the patient or not.
It's a unique capability that Angle is now offering. It cannot be done on circulating tumor DNA. It can't be done on tissue because that can't be repeated. The assay performance here is very high performance. It's been developed and validated by Angle. It's now being verified by our clinical labs for wider use. Very strong performance in that assay. On the PD-L1 assay, which has also been developed. All this work has been done since FDA. We've been tremendously busy on these commercialization content activities. There's now 8 peer-reviewed publications in 373 patients, showing the measurement of PD-L1 on circulating tumor cells isolated by our Parsortix system.
We've gone the next step to develop the assay for in-house use and eventually for launch as a reagent kit down our distributor channel. As I said, PD-L1, programmed death-ligand one, is a key protein for immunotherapy. The thing about immunotherapy is it's very expensive. Average cost is $175,000 per patient, but it only works for 1 in 5 patients. There's a massive need to determine which patients will benefit from the drug. That's not just about wasted healthcare resources, although that's incredibly expensive. The patients are basically subject to toxicity with these drugs. You don't wanna give it to them unless it's going to be useful. Again, you can see from this information here, very high performance assay.
It's in the process of being transferred into our clinical labs for offering to customers at the present moment. The announcement that we just made of the deal with BioView in relation to HER2 is one of many such announcements. It's a very clear demonstration that third parties want to work with Parsortix. Why would BioView want to work with Parsortix? Well, they have very high quality microscope solutions, which automate the process of looking at cancer cells to measure these proteins. They have an FDA-cleared clearance for measuring HER2, which is a key protein in breast cancer management in tissue. They do that in conjunction with Abbott, utilizing Abbott's PathVysion FISH kits.
It makes sense to us to combine ANGLE's Parsortix FDA clearance for harvesting cancer cells with BioView's FDA clearance for assessing them microscopically. That's the key there. Both companies can benefit from the development of a HER2 assay kit, because we can sell more Parsortix instruments, and they can sell more microscopes. Jointly, we can make additional money on the HER2 assay kit, which will be sold. There's a very large market opportunity for HER2 in breast cancer. Every single patient will have a HER2 test in their tissue if they've got breast cancer. This needs to be repeated, but at the moment, they can't access the cancer cells to do the repeat test.
We estimate that there's a $2.5 billion market opportunity for the HER2 assay kits, that's in addition to the money that we'll make selling the Parsortix instrument and consumables. As I mentioned, we've put a lot of effort into developing an assay development capability in ANGLE. We have scientists, researchers, and product development people who are highly experienced at doing assay development. As a consequence, we're leading the work that's necessary for this HER2 assay development, and BioView are contributing to the costs and doing the microscope side of things. That means that the development work, we've been able to monetize that. We will generate revenues in the region of GBP 1.2 million over the next 12 months, just in the first phase of development.
Both parties, BioView and ANGLE, have agreed that we can bring other larger companies into this collaboration at the next stage if we choose to do so, and there are many interested parties. As well as Abbott who provide FISH probes for HER2 analysis, there are large scale pharma companies such as AstraZeneca with their Enhertu drug, who have a vested interest in getting a really good HER2 assay into the market to drive adoption of their drugs. We're very, very positive about this approach, and we want to use this approach where we secure some development revenues during the development cycle, and then we have a tremendous commercial opportunity at the other end of it and a partner to work with.
We want to do that with multiple downstream technologies. That's one of our key areas of focus for commercialization. And we've already done some proof of concept work on the HER2 assay, which we published at the AACR Cancer conference a week ago. We know that we can develop a successful assay here. It's a question of productizing that and getting it in a form that can be taken to market. Now the molecular assays. Molecular analysis is the future. We hear lots of stuff about genetic testing and national governments are getting more interested in looking at the DNA makeup of people and how best to target treatment. The drive is for molecular.
Now the difficulty for molecular analysis is how do you get the sample? You can get the sample from a tissue biopsy, but you can't repeat it. There's some very large scale commercial companies, particularly in the United States, who are doing analysis for DNA of fragments of dead cancer cells, known as circulating tumor DNA. That is a very, very promising area of development. That's why some of these companies are doing well. The FDA has cleared multiple different therapies as targeted therapies based on their DNA mutational status. However, it's only part of the picture.
It doesn't give you any information on RNA, which is gene expression, nor does it give you any information on protein expression, which is key for many of these targeted drugs, such as the HER2 and the PD-L1 that we've been talking about. There's a big opportunity to get cancer cells from blood to drive this sort of molecular analysis. Now, we believe that it's important that the Parsortix solution is complementary to what is already out there. We have developed the ability to recover the plasma for circulating tumor DNA analysis from the blood sample prior to running the Parsortix harvest to get the cancer cells. That means that ANGLE will in due course be offering the protein analysis, the RNA analysis, the ctDNA analysis, and cell DNA analysis.
That means that we will provide a truly multi-omics solution in the future. You cannot do that if you can't recover cancer cells from blood. The Parsortix is the absolute critical first step to enable all of this. As you know, last year we took the view that made the commercial decision the best way to approach this market is to leverage third-party systems that are already on the market. I mentioned earlier the QIAGEN system. That is a very good digital PCR system, highly sensitive, very appropriate for working with the Parsortix harvest, and we're actively working on QIAGEN DNA solutions at the moment in EGFR, KRAS and PIK3CA. We will be using the QIAGEN digital PCR system for RNA solutions, focusing on our prostate and ovarian cancer assays.
Beyond that, we're working on Landscape DNA NGS and Landscape RNA NGS. NGS is Next-Generation Sequencing, that's sequencing the entire genome or transcriptome, depending on whether it's DNA or RNA. We have pilots running with Illumina and with Thermo Fisher at the moment, which are very large scale players in those sequencing markets. The idea here is that we can leverage the installed base. Once we show how to use the installed base of molecular platforms with the Parsortix harvest, then our distributors can sell our product into the customers for those molecular platforms. We can also, in addition to that, partner with those med tech companies and look at working together to get our product in the market because it's directly to their benefit.
If they can get the Parsortix sample going through their sequencing or PCR systems, they can drive greater volume into their own installed base. I mentioned that a key part is getting clinical data to demonstrate the value of all of this. ANGLE is funding, has developed and is funding multiple clinical studies. We've run the ANG-006 study in ovarian cancer, that has already announced extremely good results. That's complete. We haven't really talked about it, we've assembled a large scale metastatic cancer study called INFORM, which is targeting the enrollment of over 1,000 patients, that's in the U.K. and the U.S. That is moving extremely strongly.
We've had, I can't remember the exact number, well over 100 patients through that already. And the good thing about it is we get multiple blood tubes from each patient at multiple different time points. We're assembling data showing how you can monitor patients at different time points, and you can analyze key different factors. We're also banking the molecular lysates that come out of the Parsortix for subsequent analysis. That means that when we have the molecular assays that I've been talking about ready to go, we will already have banked in the freezer samples from numerous different patients in prostate, in breast cancer, in ovarian, and crucially in lung, which is a major area of focus. We will have already processed those samples on the Parsortix system.
We will have banked the samples in the freezer, and once we have the assays, we will be able to demonstrate their performance on those samples very quickly. This is ANGLE being innovative and proactive. We're getting the samples ahead of being ready to analyze them so that we can fast track the different uses to market. We're also running with ANG12 substantial prostate cancer studies with Solaris Health. We're on track with those to complete for the year end. Finally, we haven't yet started, but we're planning a study called Precise in immunotherapy, PD-L1 immune checkpoint inhibitor analysis. That will be kicked off, I expect by the end of this year. That's where we're focusing on gaining clinical utility data.
I've got two more slides and then a wrap-up. As I mentioned, this is longer than usual and a lot more detailed than usual. I thought it was important for shareholders and interested investors to see the extent of the work that's going on to drive commercialization to generate shareholder returns as fast and as effectively as possible. Moving on, this is summarizing the ovarian cancer results which came through during the year. They were highly successful results. In fact, we had area under the curve of 95%, which is by far the best in class ovarian cancer detection test, much better than alternative approaches. As a read-through for Angle, more generally, it's really important that we recognize that this is real world data.
These are women who had an abnormal pelvic mass. All of them had a condition, but it wasn't clear whether they had a benign condition or a malignant condition. This trial demonstrated that analyzing the cancer cells captured by Parsortix from a simple blood test could determine with a high degree of accuracy which women had cancer and which didn't. That makes a tremendous difference as to how they're cared for in terms of their surgery and also to do with neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Following those successful results, we've made the decision to move this assay across to a third-party molecular platform to open up a product-based solution. As I mentioned, the QIAGEN digital PCR approach is most likely the one we're gonna use for the RNA analysis. We've got those samples waiting in the freezer.
There's samples retained, so we can reanalyze them once we've got the third party molecular platform working as we wish. That will open up the ability to advise the market of those molecular protocols so that third parties can offer an ovarian cancer test. We would expect to also offer it initially as a laboratory developed test from our labs. The target is to do that in the first part of next year. The prostate cancer study that we've developed with Solaris Health. This is a very good approach because we've signed up a deal with Solaris Health, the largest urology chain of clinics in the United States, with over 700,000 patients annually. We've done that first.
We've got the commercial route to market set up for this test ahead of it being in place. We're also fast-tracking with Solaris's help, the necessary studies to assess the ability to use Parsortix to detect prostate cancer and critically assess whether it's clinically significant and needs intervention or not. We're fast-tracking these studies. We expect headline results around the year-end. If positive, these will be used to start offering a test initially from ANGLE's labs for Solaris Health to offer to their patients on a private pay basis. After that, we will obviously publish the protocols so that others can do exactly the same thing. Of course, they can only do it if they buy the Parsortix system in order to recover the cancer cells in the first place.
Thank you very much for basically listening to this much longer presentation than usual. I just want to sum up that we have multiple near-term commercial milestones. We have success in making sales to our pharmaceutical companies such as Crescendo, and we expect to see new pharma services contracts coming through in the near term. We're rolling out new assays. We've got particularly the Portrait Flex, PD-L1 and DDR assays coming through for pharma services, and that will be through shortly. We will be launching later this year a Portrait Plus product kit.
This is to be sold down the distribution network so that third parties can buy this and will have all the reagents optimized, lyophilized and in an easy-to-use format with instructions so that third parties can do exactly the same Portrait Plus analysis as we. We anticipate the completion of the prostate cancer pilot study before the year-end and expecting some very good results from that. We're targeting completion of transferring the ovarian cancer test to a third-party molecular platform also by the end of the year. If we can do that and repeat the results that we've already shown last year, we will have a very successful assay in ovarian cancer.
Last but definitely not least, there's a major focus on getting selected 30 third-party molecular solutions identified and notified to the market so that people can use it. Installed. The good thing about this approach is we can install the molecular solutions in our lab at the same time as making information available to the wider market so that they can do the same form of analysis. Again, we expect to see significant progress by the end of this year. There's a lot of momentum behind the company, and we'd like to thank our shareholders for their support. We're very confident of delivering substantial returns in the future. Thank you very much, and I'd like to hand over now for questions from the analysts.
Thank you. As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please dial into the conference call via telephone and press Star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, you may press Star two. Please ensure you're unmuted locally when asking your question. Our first question for today comes from Charles Weston of RBC Capital Markets. Charles, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Hello. Thanks for the presentation, Andrew. I just have one question. A lot of the presentation has been around the clinical testing or clinical trial testing spaces. But near the beginning of the presentation, you highlighted some of the researchers who have been buying your system and the work they've been doing. I just wondered if you could touch on the progress that you've been making in that sort of earlier stage research tools space.
Yes. Well, what we've got now is a, this is what we want to mirror in the clinical market as well. In the research market, when we first started, it was very challenging to get our first peer-reviewed publication. Now we've got a wide number of users out in the market who are developing their own uses, and we're seeing pretty much every month, at least one peer-reviewed publication coming through. We have, I think at last count, 77 peer-reviewed publications from 24 different cancer centers, all showing a high performance and potential applications of this system. Maybe, Ian, you'd like to add anything to that?
Yes. I mean, we're seeing a sort of an increase in inquiries. We've got a stronger pipeline than we've had historically for the product side of the business from the translational researchers. We're seeing that, you know, at the conferences and that, there's very, very strong interest in the ANGLE solution. Partly the sort of old legacy system, one of the ones that used to be used, which had a sort of a different FDA clearance is, we're seeing as having superseded that. In that sense, along with that increase in publications up to, as Andrew said, 77 now, then we've got a lot of momentum building behind that.
Some of these, some of the publications that, they're in sort of, breakthrough research areas are then leading to follow-on inquiries and sales, for other, of these translational researchers wanting to do similar type of work to replicate that in their lab and test out some of these results. It's that sort of ecosystem is all building and reinforcing itself.
Thank you. My last question was just around cash, please. If you could just comment. You got just over, I think finished at just over GBP 30 million. What the, you know, your anticipation of burn rate for the year?
As we've just reported, GBP 32 million at the year-end, another GBP 2.8 million of R&D tax credits coming in. Obviously, the gross margin from sales that we close out in the period. That takes our cash runway out to about into second half or H2 2024. Well, last year we were burning a bit less, but we're planning on a sort of a net GBP 2 million burn a month at the moment through 2023, and that's to deliver on all the activities that we've been talking about. We are very conscious that we need to tightly manage our cash.
Obviously, we announced last October, we regrettably had to take the tough decision to close down the Canada operations, partly reflecting the fact the R&D tax credits regime had changed in the U.K. and costs were a lot higher. We're focusing very hard on our core activities, which meant some of the programs have had to be pushed out or we'll do more in a serial fashion rather than a parallel fashion. We're trying to make sure we right-size to progress here.
You'll have seen with the BioView, that's generating income, but it's also a partnership approach to get some of the product development done, which is a cost-effective use of our cash and our resources, and various other activities to make sure that we are sort of tightly managing the cash, reflecting where we are. We are also, you know, making sure that we deliver on the milestones and the news flow that goes with that. You know, the shareholders', investors gave us money to deliver against those milestones, and we've got to progress that. It's a tough environment. We recognize that, and therefore, we have to be careful with how we deploy our cash and the particular areas we spend our money on.
Thanks, both.
Thank you. As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please dial into the conference call via telephone and press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Okay, at this time, we have no further questions. I'll hand back to the speaker team for any further remarks.
I just want to thank the shareholders for their support, and we're looking forward to a very successful 2023. Thank you.