NHS to test multi-cancer blood tests on 20,000 GP patients in £8.49m randomised trial

The Department of Health and Social Care, the Office for Life Sciences and the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade announced on 4 November 2026 a randomised trial, STRIDE-RCT, that will offer multi-cancer blood tests to more than 20,000 NHS patients in at least 200 GP practices in England¹. The government is putting up to £8.49 million into the study through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR)¹.

What the trial will test

Patients aged 45 and over who see their GP with abdominal symptoms, such as persistent bloating or discomfort, will be invited to join¹. Each blood sample is analysed for signs of several cancers at once, and the tests also suggest which part of the body a cancer is likely to come from¹. Most of the tests were developed by the University of Birmingham and need one or two tubes of blood taken alongside routine bloods at the practice¹. The government says the tests draw on artificial intelligence as well as measurement of proteins in the blood¹.

The list of target cancers is long:

• bowel, small bowel, stomach and oesophageal cancer
• pancreatic, liver, bile duct and gallbladder cancer
• ovarian, endometrial, kidney, bladder and prostate cancer

A positive result does not count as a diagnosis. It is meant to help the GP and patient decide whether an urgent referral is warranted¹. The trial measures how the tests perform alongside the GP's own judgement, and a decision on national rollout will follow only after that assessment¹.

The case for the study rests on two numbers in the announcement. Around 71,000 people in England are diagnosed each year with pancreatic, stomach, liver, ovarian or bowel cancer, and there are almost 35,000 deaths from these cancers¹. At the other end of the pathway, only 2-6% of urgent cancer referrals end in a diagnosis, so most patients sent for urgent tests do not have cancer¹. Co-chief investigator Aneel Bhangu said the tests "might help GPs tell the two apart, but we need to know for certain before they are used across the NHS"¹.

What it means for the market

For NHS commissioners and cancer alliances, the trial targets the referral bottleneck rather than screening of healthy people. The government frames the aim as giving GPs a further tool to sort patients, with the goal of lowering the share of fruitless urgent referrals and releasing appointments for those who need them¹. If that works, the value case for these tests would be built on diagnostic capacity as much as on earlier detection.

For diagnostics suppliers, the announcement says companies from around the world want to work with the NHS to evaluate blood tests of this kind¹. A government-funded randomised trial in primary care, set in inner-city, rural, seaside and deprived areas, gives the NHS a single evidence base against which a national purchasing decision could later be made¹. The study sits inside the National Cancer Plan and the Life Sciences Sector Plan; the government also points to £1 billion in public-private life sciences investment announced by the Chancellor, taking the total secured since July 2025 to more than £4 billion¹.

For AI developers, the role of artificial intelligence in the tests is described only in general terms. The announcement does not say which tests use it, how the models were trained or which suppliers beyond the University of Birmingham are involved¹.

Caveats

This is a trial at launch, not a result. The announcement gives no accuracy figures, no timetable for recruitment or reporting, and no detail on how many separate tests will be compared¹. NIHR chief executive Lucy Chappell described the study as a test of whether placing multi-cancer detection tests in routine GP consultations can bring diagnosis forward¹. Co-chief investigator Dmitri Nepogodiev said practices were chosen in inner cities, coastal towns and rural areas "so the results apply to everyone the NHS serves"¹. Any move to nationwide use waits on the trial's assessment of how the tests work alongside GPs' judgement¹.