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A new NHS trial will test whether simple blood tests can help GPs in England spot hard-to-diagnose abdominal cancers sooner. More than 20,000 patients aged 45 and over who visit their GP with symptoms such as abdominal pain or persistent bloating will be invited to take part, across at least 200 surgeries. The government-funded trial, called STRIDE-RCT, is run by the University of Birmingham.
The tests look for signals of cancer in the blood, such as proteins or fragments of DNA shed by tumours, and use AI to analyse the results. As well as flagging that cancer may be present, they can suggest where in the body it is coming from. Patients give one or two extra tubes of blood alongside their routine tests. The trial covers 13 cancers, including bowel, stomach, oesophageal, pancreatic, liver, ovarian, kidney, bladder and prostate cancer.
Abdominal cancers are often found late because early symptoms are vague and easily mistaken for less serious conditions. Around 71,000 people in England are diagnosed with pancreatic, stomach, liver, ovarian or bowel cancer each year, and nearly 35,000 die from them. Peter Johnson, NHS England's national clinical director for cancer, said spotting cancer in the abdomen early is notoriously difficult. Co-chief investigator Aneel Bhangu, a colorectal surgeon, said too many of his patients reach him after months of vague symptoms.
The trial, funded with up to £8.49m, will assess whether the tests work well enough alongside GPs' own judgement to help decide which patients need urgent investigation. Cancer Research UK said GPs have long needed better tools to help them through that uncertainty.
A positive result does not confirm cancer, and a negative result is not a guaranteed all-clear. Multi-cancer blood tests have had mixed results so far: a separate NHS trial of the Galleri test recently failed to meet its main goal of reducing late-stage diagnoses. The new tests will only be rolled out more widely if this trial shows they are accurate enough.
The trial is led by Aneel Bhangu and Dmitri Nepogodiev at the University of Birmingham and funded by the Office for Life Sciences through the National Institute for Health and Care Research.
