Recruitment will continue to 1,000 newly diagnosed NHS cancer patients, and 350 symptomatic and healthy volunteers, from five hospitals across the country. The trial is run by University of Southampton researchers in partnership with the Southampton Clinical Trials Unit (SCTU) and Proteotype Diagnostics Ltd – and sponsored by University Hospital Southampton. Funding comes from the Office for Life Sciences (Department of Health and Social Care; Department for Science, Innovation and Technology) and the National Institute For Health and Care Research (NIHR) i4i programme.

Roughly 385,000 people are diagnosed with cancer in the UK each year, yet only four national screening programmes exist, each focused on a single cancer. Many cancers cause few or non-specific symptoms until advanced.