NHS trial offers a blood test for 13 cancers to 20,000 people with symptoms

England’s National Health Service (NHS) is starting a trial that will offer a new kind of blood test to 20,000 patients who visit their family doctor with vague stomach symptoms.¹ The test looks for signs of several cancers at once, and coverage describes it as able to detect 13 types, including bowel, pancreatic, liver and ovarian cancer.² The trial is backed by the UK government.¹ It has no results yet. Its job is to find out whether these tests help doctors catch cancers in the belly earlier than they do now.

What the trial will do

The trial is called STRIDE-RCT.¹ It will recruit patients over 45 who come to one of 200 GP surgeries (family doctor practices) with common symptoms such as bloating, stomach cramps, heartburn, diarrhoea and constipation.¹ These patients will be offered a blood test that looks for DNA shed by tumours, along with telltale proteins in the blood.¹

Doctors call tests like this multi-cancer tests, because one blood sample is checked for signs of many different cancers. The trial will compare tests from three companies. Each looks for signs of several cancers in a single sample and suggests where in the body a cancer may be coming from.¹ The report does not name the three companies.

For most patients, taking part means giving one or two extra tubes of blood at their GP practice, at the same time as routine blood tests.¹ The tests use artificial intelligence (AI), computer software trained to spot patterns, to analyse the samples.¹

The cancers covered are bowel, small bowel, stomach, oesophageal (food pipe), pancreatic, liver, bile duct and gallbladder, ovarian, endometrial (womb lining), kidney, bladder and prostate cancer.¹

Why these cancers are the target

Cancers in the abdomen are hard to diagnose because their early symptoms are common and easy to mistake for less serious problems.¹ Bloating or heartburn, for example, is far more often caused by something harmless than by cancer.

The numbers explain why the NHS is focused on them. Around 70,000 people in England are diagnosed with pancreatic, stomach, liver, ovarian or bowel cancer each year, and there are almost 35,000 deaths from these cancers.¹ Timing matters a great deal. Around nine in ten people diagnosed with bowel cancer at stage 1, the earliest stage, survive at least five years. At stage 4, when the cancer has spread, the figure is around one in ten.¹

The idea behind the new tests is to pick up early markers of cancer before severe symptoms develop, so cancers can be treated before they progress.¹

What the evidence shows so far

This article is about the start of a trial, not its results. The sources describe what the trial will measure, not how well the tests perform. None of them give figures on how often the tests correctly find cancer, how often they miss it, or how often they raise a false alarm in someone who does not have cancer.

The trial is set up to answer a practical question: do these tests help GPs make better decisions? Doctors in the trial will record how strongly they suspect cancer in each patient. That lets researchers see how the tests perform alongside a doctor’s own judgement, not just on their own.¹ The NHS will assess the results before any decision on rolling the tests out nationwide.¹

Officials called it a “world-first trial”.¹ Health Secretary Yvette Cooper said:

“The earlier cancers are diagnosed, the more chance they can be successfully treated, and lives can be saved. This world-first trial will establish whether simple blood tests can help GPs identify much sooner the patients who need urgent support.”

¹

What it does not show yet

Several important questions remain open, and the trial is meant to start answering some of them:

• Accuracy. No performance data for the three tests appear in the sources.
• Benefit to patients. Finding a cancer earlier is the goal. Whether that leads to more people surviving is a separate question that a blood test result alone cannot settle.
• Side effects of testing. The reports do not describe what happens to patients whose test is positive, or how false alarms will be handled.
• Timing. The sources do not say when recruitment will finish or when results are expected.

Blood tests for many cancers have had setbacks before. The page carrying the Mirror’s report links to an earlier story from the same outlet headlined “’Holy grail’ blood test to help NHS diagnose different cancers fails in trial”.¹ The current report does not say whether that test is one of the three in this trial, and it gives no details of that earlier result.

Who is behind it

The trial is run by the NHS and backed by the government.¹ The report links the trial to the University of Birmingham.¹ The three tests come from companies that are not named in the coverage, so the sources do not show what those companies are contributing or whether they are paying for any part of the work.

Professor Peter Johnson, NHS England’s director for cancer, said that “detecting abdomen cancer early is notoriously difficult because the symptoms can easily be mistaken for other less serious conditions but the NHS is determined to find a solution.”¹ He added that “this trial will help us to find out whether blood tests can help GPs get the right patients to the right tests sooner, supporting earlier diagnosis when treatment is most likely to be successful.”¹

Jonathan Reynolds, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, said that “finding cases early is key, giving patients a clear path to treatment and helping save lives.”¹

How it fits with other NHS early-detection efforts

This is not the NHS’s only attempt to find belly cancers sooner. In June 2025 the NHS announced a three-year pilot for pancreatic cancer in more than 300 GP practices in England.³ That pilot takes a different approach. Instead of a new blood test, GP teams search patient records for people over 60 who show warning signs such as a recent diabetes diagnosis or sudden weight loss.³ Those flagged as at risk are offered urgent blood tests and CT scans to rule out cancer.³

Pancreatic cancer is the fifth most common cause of cancer deaths in the UK, and about half of patients diagnosed with it have had a recent diabetes diagnosis.³ Speaking about that pilot, Peter Johnson said that “patients don’t usually notice symptoms until the cancer is at an advanced stage, which is why we need to find new ways to pick it up.”³

The two efforts share a goal but differ in method. The 2025 pilot uses information already in medical records to decide who needs a scan. The new trial tests whether a blood sample, read by AI and combined with a doctor’s judgement, can do a better job of sorting people with vague symptoms.¹³

What to watch next

The next steps to follow are how quickly the 200 GP surgeries recruit their 20,000 patients, which companies’ tests are being compared, and when the first results are published.¹ The key findings will be how often each test correctly points to cancer, how often it raises false alarms, and whether adding the test to a GP’s judgement gets people with cancer to scans and specialists sooner. Only after that will the NHS decide whether to offer the tests across the country.¹

Biohack will follow this trial in this story thread as it develops.