10112443Urine-based "MCED At Home" test using amino acid biomarkers already validated in plasmaClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKCancer Research UK now estimates that 1 in 2 of us will develop cancer within our lifetime. In addition to being a significant personal concern from the patient perspective, cancer is also a major public healthcare challenge for single payor healthcare systems like the NHS. Cancer can be treated more effectively when detected early. More treatment options are available. Currently, just over half of cancers are detected early. The NHS estimates that if we could increase this to detect 3 in 4 cancers early, 55,000 more people each year would survive their diagnosis for 5 years or more. Many types of cancer don't initially cause clear symptoms, so they are often missed until patients present to their GP at a late stage. Detecting pre-symptomatic cancers often requires screening patients that don't have cancer symptoms. The NHS has been investigating whether Multi Cancer Early Detection (MCED) screening could improve cancer outcomes for patients and reduce healthcare costs. MCED tests can detect multiple cancers from a single test. MCED tests currently being developed are blood tests. Patients would still need to present to their GP, or another healthcare setting, for screening. Deploying such a test at a large or population-level scale could still pose organisational challenges with limited GP appointments and stretched NHS resources. It could also be expensive. Proteotype Diagnostics is developing a new type of MCED test that would require only a urine sample, which patients could collect themselves at home, like a pregnancy test, and then post to a lab for analysis. Proteotype already has more advanced blood-based tests in development, but wants to explore the feasibility of using it's technology to allow a patient-centric urine assay. The project will refine the urine assay, measure how well it performs in the laboratory, determine whether the urine assay can distinguish between samples from patients who are healthy and who have breast cancer, and investigate how the urine assay could be used with robotic "liquid handling" systems that were used during the pandemic to measure hundreds of samples at one time.