SBRI Healthcare has announced the winners of NHS England’s multi-million pound funding for late stage innovation projects that advance earlier and faster diagnosis of cancer.

In partnership with the NHS Cancer Programme and the Accelerated Access Collaborative, more than £9 million of funding has been pledged for eight late stage innovation projects that advance the earlier and faster diagnosis of cancer.

The innovations support the NHS Long Term Plan ambitions for cancer; that by 2028, an extra 55,000 people will survive cancer for five years or more, and 75 per cent of people will be diagnosed earlier, at stage one or two.

The funding competition, launched in March 2021, is the first of its kind, and attracted 51 applications from the open market. It called for late stage solutions to the challenges of improving the early detection and diagnosis of cancer; and diagnostic efficiency for cancer services. All winning technologies have already proven their clinical effectiveness, and through this programme will be implemented either locally or nationally, to prove they can be rolled out.

A second competition call is planned for the spring of 2022, continuing the series of multi-million pound funding calls, supporting the NHS Long Term Plan ambitions by fast-tracking high quality cancer innovations.

Among those receiving funding are: The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust (£610,774) for a whole body MRI for Inherited Cancer Early Diagnosis (ICED); and Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (£1,624,825 ) for the dissemination of the Newcastle MSI-PLUS assay for Lynch syndrome screening and therapeutic targeting.