Public Funding for Xgenera Ltd

In the 2020, there were 18.1 million reported cases of cancer, resulting in nearly 10 million deaths globally. Within the United Kingdom, an annual incidence of approximately 367,000 new cancer cases emphasizes the pressing nature of this health concern (CRUK). There is a well-established correlation between stage at diagnosis and cancer associated morbidity and mortality, predominantly due to the diminishing success rate of treatment options at late stage. Screening tests for cancer are limited, often focusing on a single cancer type and involving invasive and/or expensive procedures. Early detection testing of multiple cancers with very low false positive rate across all cancer stages from a single blood draw would lead to a paradigm shift in cancer-screening resulting in major public health impact through speeding up diagnosis, bringing improved clinical decision making and patient survival outcome. Using artificial intelligence (AI) and miRNA datasets from 20,000 blood serum samples, Xgenera have defined and evaluated a panel of 50 miRNAs for the early detection of cancer. Across 12 cancers, testing and validation provided an impressive performance of 99% sensitivity and 99% specificity across all cancer stages (I-IV) for a cancer/no cancer decision and was able to inform on the location of a cancer with an accuracy of 96%. In this project we will optimise and evaluate alternative methods for the extraction, amplification and measurement of miONCO's miRNA biomarker panel. These will be compared to miONCO's current assay methodology and assessed on their ability to improve sensitivity and throughput efficiency, generating a finalised assay ready for testing in a large, real-world patient cohort.