Early Detection Innovation Sandpit and Award

The Early Detection Innovation Sandpit and Award will catalyse new multidisciplinary collaborations to drive forward novel test technologies or novel test combinations for primary care triage. This sandpit is in partnership with the Medical Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

To apply for this funding you must attend a sandpit workshop — an intensive and interactive 3-day event where you will have the opportunity to:

• Network and form new collaborations spanning diverse research areas and organisations
• Work in broad, multidisciplinary teams to generate new and innovative research ideas
• Pitch projects for seed funding to test the feasibility of your ideas

The theme for the November 2021 workshop is the development of novel test technologies or novel test combinations for primary care triage.

The majority of cancer patients are diagnosed via primary care. Whilst some patients will enter a 'suspicion of cancer' pathway and receive expedited testing and diagnosis, a significant proportion will receive routine referrals for follow up testing in secondary care, which are associated with a long interval to diagnosis. Patients that receive a referral – suspected cancer or other – will often have had more than one consultation in primary care prior to that referral. Patients not receiving a referral can be advised to re-attend if symptoms persist or worsen, with the risk that they do not come back into healthcare or only do so after a prolonged period of time. These delays can allow time for disease progression, thereby missing the window of opportunity for earlier, and potentially more successful, therapeutic intervention.

There is a need for new test technologies or novel combinations of new/existing tests which, alongside patient factors including socio-demographics and symptom/clinical history, enable GPs to identify patients in primary care who are at high risk of obtaining a cancer diagnosis and are therefore likely to benefit from expedited diagnostic testing referrals. Equally, the development of tests which identify patients who have a very low risk of obtaining a cancer diagnosis and therefore do not need to be prioritised for urgent testing would be valuable for primary care decision making.

This workshop will bring together the cancer research community with networks from outside biomedicine such as computational and data scientists, engineers, chemists and physicists. We aim to stimulate ideas for novel and innovative approaches to triaging primary care patients who may be at risk of receiving a cancer diagnosis.

The triage testing approaches could be single modality or multimodal and could be point-of-care tests or tests which are ordered and assessed in primary care. CRUK-MRC-EPSRC are also keen to encourage research into multi-modal data integration approaches which integrate combinations of tests and patient data through novel analysis methods, potentially giving a more holistic insight as to a patient's likely cancer status.

The research ideas you develop at the workshop could investigate some or a combination of the following challenges:

• Development of new sensor devices:

  • Novel molecular-based or imaging-based diagnostic approaches to detect biomarkers relevant in the primary care setting.

  • Innovation in sensor technology to detect cancer biomarkers or combinations of biomarkers. For instance, sensor technology to detect biomarkers in blood, breath, urine etc.

• Development of new computational approaches – new analytics and algorithms to:

  • Identify high-risk groups of symptomatic patients presenting to primary care through the integration of multiple datasets e.g. electronic health record data (patterns of prior symptom reporting, prescription history, reporting history etc.), family history, routine blood tests etc. Approaches to risk stratify the general population are not within the remit of this sandpit.

  • Identify sensitive and specific biomarkers/other signatures through large datasets (e.g. omics) which could be indicative of receiving a future cancer diagnosis.

• Development of new integrative modalities of cancer diagnostic tools and/or decision-making tools. This includes approaches to integrate new/existing tests and also approaches which leverage electronic health record data and other health care data.

Research ideas developed at the workshop are likely to be at early stages of the translational pipeline however, all ideas should consider line-of-sight to clinical impact.