More than one in 3 people are predicted to develop cancer at some point during their lifetime. Current cancer detection approaches have limitations and usually capture very late stages. 46% of cancer-diagnosed patients, however, would have benefited from early detection and stratification. The society’s costs due to loss of productivity from cancer account for £18 billion a year in the UK, and the NHS could save more than £200 million a year from early diagnostics.
MeDNA are developing a method, which can detect global changes in DNA, known to occur very early in cancer pathogenesis and are also a useful biomarker for cancer stratification. The test is cheap, fast and based on a widely used clinical methodology, which can easily be adopted by clinical labs. As such, our test can also be useful in less developed countries, which cannot afford high-tech and expensive novel technologies such as genomic sequencing.