Multi-cancer blood tests to be offered at about 200 GP surgeries in England in major new trial
More than 20,000 patients aged 45 and over with abdominal symptoms will be offered blood tests designed to detect 13 cancers sooner, under a government-funded trial led by the University of Birmingham.
New blood tests designed to check for several cancers at once are to be offered to patients at about 200 GP surgeries in England, in a trial that could change how doctors investigate vague symptoms that are difficult to interpret.
The government-funded trial, known as STRIDE-RCT and led by the University of Birmingham, will recruit more than 20,000 patients aged 45 and over who visit their GP with symptoms such as abdominal pain, persistent bloating, stomach cramps, heartburn, diarrhoea or constipation.
Patients taking part will provide one or two tubes of blood, taken at their GP practice alongside routine blood tests. The samples will be examined for proteins or fragments of DNA shed by tumours that may signal the presence of cancer.
The trial covers 13 cancers: bowel, small bowel, stomach, oesophageal, pancreatic, liver, bile duct and gallbladder, ovarian, endometrial, kidney, bladder and prostate cancer. Together, these cancers account for tens of thousands of deaths each year in England.
The reason for focusing on these cancers is that many of them develop quietly. Their early signs — a dull ache, bloating, a change in bowel habits — can easily be mistaken for common, less serious conditions, which means they are often discovered only after they have spread, when treatment is less likely to succeed.
Professor Peter Johnson, NHS England's national clinical director for cancer, has described detecting abdominal cancers early as notoriously difficult for exactly that reason. GPs have long needed better tools to decide which patients need urgent referral and which can safely be monitored, according to Cancer Research UK's Michelle Mitchell.
Three different blood tests will be assessed in the trial, including one called Enlighten, developed by the UK biotechnology firm Proteotype Diagnostics, which looks for proteins in the blood that indicate the immune system is responding to the first signs of cancer. Another test, Signatera, is already used on the NHS to help detect whether some cancers have returned after initial diagnosis.
The tests will use artificial intelligence to analyse samples, and the trial will assess how well they work alongside GPs' own judgement before any decision is made about rolling them out more widely across the NHS.
There are important limits to what the tests can promise. A positive result does not automatically mean a person has cancer, and a negative result is not a guaranteed all-clear. The trial is designed to find out whether the tests are accurate enough, in real GP surgeries, to justify wider use — not to replace existing diagnosis.
The trial follows the earlier NHS-Galleri trial, which tested a single blood test for multiple cancers before symptoms appeared in more than 142,000 people aged 50 to 77. Results published in September 2026 showed that trial did not meet its primary objective of reducing the combined incidence of stage III and stage IV cancers across 12 cancer types, a reminder that promising laboratory science still has to prove itself in large, real-world studies. STRIDE-RCT is the next attempt to answer that question, this time for patients who already have symptoms.
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