PRESS RELEASE : New government tech deals boost the business of cancer detection [October 2024]

The press release issued by the Department of Health and Social Care on 6 October 2024.

New UK-created therapies for cancer will be trialled in the UK – furthering the nation’s life sciences industry as one of the great drivers of economic growth.

A raft of new UK-created therapies for cancer will be trialled in the UK – furthering the nation’s life sciences industry as one of the great drivers of economic growth.

New partnerships backed by public and private sector investment will trial new ways to tackle cancer and other life-threatening diseases with faster diagnoses and better treatments, deploying innovative technologies and approaches .

This could unleash a raft of new medical tech products onto the global market, including more flexible medical scanners and an AI tool to help spot lung cancer sooner. The potential of these breakthrough technologies to give new hope to patients, and to become commercial successes, is a demonstration of this government’s ambitions for the UK’s R&D base and the NHS to work hand-in-hand with the private sector, to bring the latest high-tech innovations into daily use across the health service as part of the government’s wider mission to reform the NHS.

Medical technologies like these not only offer the hope of longer, healthier lives to people living with diseases like cancer, but also drive economic growth through the UK’s world leading life sciences industry. Their adoption is also critical to building an NHS that is match-fit for the future, as emphasised in the findings of the recent Darzi Review. This independent report laid bare the current problems facing the NHS, including the fact that the cancer survival rates in England are lagging far behind other countries. Today’s package of investment will play a crucial role in the government’s plans to address these challenges and rebuild and reform the NHS, which will prioritise the adoption of innovative technologies and approaches and identify ways to do things differently across the health service in order to provide a better service for patients.

It comes as UK Research and Innovation announces a £118 million fund that will create five new hubs across the country, from Glasgow to Bristol, to help develop new health technologies. The funding will be split between government funding and partner support – inviting business to help the mission to kickstart the economy and build an NHS fit for the future. The Hubs will work in intimate partnership with the private sector – with experts at UCL developing scanners to improve cancer surgery, delivering their research together with both large MedTech multinationals and British start-ups, for example.

The International Investment Summit, taking place in a matter of days, will see government form a new partnership with business to grow our economy through more high quality, long-term investment and innovation.

Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said:

Cancer is a disease that has brought pain, misery and heartbreak to every family in the country, including my own. But through government working in partnership with the NHS, researchers, and business, we can harness science and innovation to bring the detection and treatment of this horrendous disease firmly in to the 21st century, keeping more families together for longer.

The UK’s scientists, researchers and captains of industry have brilliant ideas that aren’t just going to boost our health – they’ll boost our economy too, helping to build a virtuous circle for more investment in both health and research which will ultimately drive up living standards.

Health and Social Care Secretary, Wes Streeting, said:

As a cancer survivor, I know how vital an early cancer diagnosis and the latest treatments are. This investment will not only save lives, but also secure Britain’s status as a powerhouse for life sciences and medical technology.

When we combine the care of the NHS and the genius of our country’s leading scientific minds, we can develop life changing treatments for patients and help get Britain’s economy booming.

The Science Secretary will be speaking to business leaders across the life sciences sector, encouraging a raft of investment into the UK for drug development, clinical trials and MedTech production.

Already contributing £108 billion to the UK economy, the life sciences industry drove £800 million in foreign direct investment into the UK in 2023, and supports around 300,000 jobs up and down the country.

Today’s announcements showcase the impact that could potentially be made to cancer, as well as other diseases, through ensuring the government and NHS works hand in hand with life sciences research institutions and industry, to drive the development of new treatments and diagnostics.

New medical tech and treatments that could eventually be brought to market include:

• Developing cheaper, more easily usable scanners that will help surgeons detect early signs of cancers and remove tumours with greater success. These tools could be more readily available than those currently in use across the NHS.
• Speeding up the time required to bring new drugs to market by testing ‘micro-dosing’ – an approach which sees a tiny amount of a drug delivered to a small part of the body. This work could provide a new
• pathway for clinically trialling new treatments for lung infection and inflammation much faster and cheaper than at present.
• Driving forward personalised treatments for cancer patients who are receiving immunotherapy – using their own immune system to identify and attack cancer cells. New ways of monitoring patients could allow a real-time view of how a therapy is working, offering the opportunity to tweak it to the patient’s needs.
• Training AI models to be used in quickly and accurately diagnosing cancer through a new cross-NHS data network that researchers can access.

The life sciences sector is one of the crown jewels of the British economy – exemplified by the work by Oxford University and AstraZeneca that produced the world’s first Covid-19 vaccine, as well as the government’s 10-year partnership with Moderna to anchor the production of millions of lifesaving vaccines here in the UK.

The MedTech sector specifically is also booming, supporting more than 138,000 jobs and exporting more than £5.6 billion in products annually. And there are life sciences clusters right across the UK that provide high-skill, high-wage jobs from Merseyside to the North East.

Support for today’s announcements

Commenting on MANIFEST, Professor Samra Turajlic, project lead, Clinical Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute, and Consultant Medical Oncologist at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, said:

In the last ten years we have made huge progress in the treatment of cancer with immunotherapy, but we are still underserving many patients due to treatment failure and side effects. We have a unique opportunity in the UK, especially given the NHS, to address this challenge.

We are hugely excited to work together with such a large group of clinicians, patients and our industry partners, each with unique experiences and expertise. Research on this scale can get us one step closer to better tests in the clinic, but also fuel more discoveries regarding cancer immunology and new therapies. Ultimately, we want to speed up the delivery of personalised medicine for a disease that affects huge numbers of people across the UK every year.

Also commenting on MANIFEST, Chief Executive of Cancer Research UK, Michelle Mitchell, added:

The Francis Crick Institute is carrying out world-leading research with the backing of Cancer Research UK, the MRC and the Wellcome Trust. Further funding from the UK government to support promising immunotherapy research at the Institute is a welcome boost towards kinder, more personalised treatments for cancer. It’s crucial for the UK’s economic wellbeing, as well as its health, for the UK government to be ambitious in funding world-class cancer research.

Commenting on the UKRI Healthcare Research and Partnership Hubs, EPSRC Executive Chair Professor Charlotte Deane said:

The five new hubs bring together a wealth of expertise from across academia, industry and charities to improve population health, transform disease prediction and diagnosis, and accelerate the development of new interventions.

They represent an exciting range of adventurous techniques and approaches that have great potential to improve the lives of millions of people here in the UK and across the world.

Commenting on the pathology data network, Vin Diwakar, National Director of Transformation at NHS England said:

The investment in AI pathology represents new hope in helping us to treat and cure a range of diseases. By supporting secure access to this unique dataset, we can help researchers to learn more about various conditions, including cancer, so that they can both spot how to prevent disease and also find the next generation of treatments and cures faster.

The NHS is globally unique in holding data for the entire population. This makes the test result information we hold particularly valuable for AI training as we know that it represents the population properly.

Like all data in NHS secure data environments, there are strict access rules, meaning the information will remain under the control of the NHS at all times and will only allow secure access to approved researchers who are conducting analysis which improves health and care.

Commenting on the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Invention for Innovation (i4i) Early Cancer Diagnosis Clinical Validation and Evaluation funding call, Professor Mike Lewis, Scientific Director for Innovation at NIHR said:

Developing early diagnosis technologies that are closer to cancer patients is a key aim of this NIHR funding – the potential to find cancers earlier will give patients more choice of treatment, and enable us to save lives in the future.

Funding breakdown

• MANIFEST: £9 million; £4 million from Office for Life Sciences, £5 million from the Medical Research Council
• UKRI–EPSRC Healthcare Research and Partnership Hubs: £118 million; £54 million from government, £64 million cash and in-kind backing from partners
• AI digital pathology data platform: £6.4 million from government
• NIHR i4i Early Cancer Diagnosis Clinical Validation and Evaluation funding call: £11 million from government
• Advancing Precision Medicine funding call: £4 million from government

Notes to editors

The £9 million MANIFEST (Multinomic Analysis of Immunotherapy Features Evidencing Success and Toxicity) consortium is led by the Francis Crick Institute together with the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, as well academic and industry partners. It will support the better targeting of immunotherapy as a treatment for cancer.

Led out of the world-leading Francis Crick Institute, MANIFEST will examine the biomarkers – measurable signs of a patient’s health status – present in patients before they start immunotherapy, with a view to developing tests that can monitor these biomarkers during treatment.  These tests could help indicate if a given treatment is likely to work, helping doctors to personalise immunotherapy treatments to individual patients. MANIFEST is co-funded by the UKRI Medical Research Council and the Office for Life Sciences.

£6.4 million is being invested by the government in new data infrastructure which will pull together digital pathology data from across the NHS to make it easier for researchers to access. Researchers will be able to train AI models on this unique set of information, in order to improve how quickly and accurately cancer and other diseases can be spotted. Early diagnosis and treatment is critical to cancer survival and recovery. This project is led by the NHS Data for Research and Development Programme. The programme is establishing a health data research infrastructure to provide rapid access to the world’s largest linked data sets for research.

Full details of the £118 million UKRI–EPSRC Healthcare Research and Partnership Hubs

• Optical and Acoustic Imaging for Surgical and Interventional Sciences (OASIS) Hub – led by University College London. Working on new imaging tools to help surgeons identify cancers – including breast cancer – and remove tumours with greater success.
• MAINSTREAM research and partnership hub for health technologies in Manufacturing Stem Cells – led by University of Glasgow. Working on potential therapies using adult stem cells, which could help cancer patients regenerate bone marrow after chemotherapy.
• Research and Partnership Hub in Microscale Science and Technology to Accelerate Therapeutic Innovation (MicroTex) – led by University of Edinburgh. Working on a new method for clinically trialling new drugs with lung disease patients, which could lead to much faster and cheaper results.
• The VIVO Hub for Enhanced Independent Living – led by University of Bristol. Developing wearable technologies to help people with age-related mobility issues manage health conditions that impair their mobility.
• National Hub for Advanced Long-acting Therapeutics (HALo) – led by University of Liverpool. Looking into the potential of Long-Acting Therapeutics, drugs where the patient only needs to take one dose, which could then last for weeks or even months, rather than having to take doses daily or multiple times daily (which can become a burden, and lead to missed doses and subsequent complications).

Winners of the £11 million NIHR i4i Early Cancer Diagnosis Clinical Validation and Evaluation funding call.

Professor George Hanna, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine
PANACEA: PAN Alimentary Cancer Exhaled breath Analysis
Researching the accuracy of a new breath test for multiple gastrointestinal cancers (oesophageal, gastric, pancreatic, liver and colorectal) as well as studying how to introduce it into primary care.

Dr Carlos Arteta Montilva, Optellum Ltd
CLEAREST: Clinical evaluation of lung cancer detection and diagnosis software
Studying how artificial intelligence (AI) software could help medical imaging experts to find suspicious ‘spots’ in the lungs and assist them in deciding if they could be early lung cancer.

Professor Ros Eeles, The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust
Integration of the PRODICT TM test into the cancer risk pathway
Evaluating a genetic test to identify people at risk of developing cancer, to find out how it can be integrated into the NHS.

Dr Andrew Shapanis, Professor Paul Skipp, XGENERA Ltd
miONCO-Dx: A novel multi cancer early diagnostic test
Improving the efficiency and evaluating the performance of a new cancer blood test for use as a screening tool.

Professor Andrew Davies, University of Southampton, and Dr Emma Yates, Proteotype Diagnostics Ltd
Cost-effective multi-cancer early detection by measuring patient plasma amino acid cross sections with the Enlighten test
Testing how a new type of multi cancer early detection test performs in an NHS context. Researchers will also plan for how the test could be used within deprived communities.

Professor Brendan Delaney, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine
Artificial Intelligence to support cancer early diagnosis in general practice. (AI-DIP)
Developing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Assistant to improve the early diagnosis of cancer in general practice, using pancreatic and lung cancer as case studies.

Second round of winners of Innovate UK’s £4 million Advancing Precision Medicine funding call

AI-VISION: An observational study validating a predictive algorithm integrating multi-modal data for patient prognostication and treatment stratification in triple negative breast cancer
– Project lead: Concr Ltd
– Project partner: Durham University; Institute of Cancer Research

AIPIR – Development of an advanced AI proteomic platform to identify, track and predict host response to solid tumour immunotherapies
– Project lead: Eliptica Limited
– Project partner: University of Edinburgh

ST TCR – Unlocking the discovery of novel shared targets and T-cell receptors for precision cancer therapies
– Project lead: Exogene Limited
– Project partner: Outsee Limited

End-to end AI-assisted workflow for prostate-specific membrane antigen PET/CT reporting
– Project lead: Mirada Medical Limited
– Project partners: Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, University of Bristol

Revolutionising breast cancer prognosis with OncoSignatur: an innovative, cost-effective qPCR profiling test for improved, personalised patient pathways
– Project lead: Signatur Biosciences Ltd
– Project partner: University of Oxford

AI digital diagnostics platform to streamline the diagnosis of blood cancers
– Project lead: Spotlight Pathology Ltd
– Project partner: Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust