Media Monitoring: 17th – 23rd July

In a recent publication, a research team from Cambridge and Proteotype Diagnostics unveiled a blood test that detects cancer early and predicts treatment response by decoding immune system signals rather than relying on tumour DNA.
Published in a seminal paper titled “Immunodiagnostic plasma amino acid residue biomarkers detect cancer early and predict treatment response” in Nature Communications on 14 July, the study describes the Amino Acid Concentration Signature (AACS) platform – a minimally invasive test that profiles specific amino acid residues in plasma as indicators of cancer-related immune activity.
These changes can be detected before tumours release enough DNA to be identified by current liquid biopsy technologies.

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine, funded by Breakthrough T1D, are evaluating GTT@home, a new finger-prick, at-home glucose tolerance test, to monitor early-stage type 1 diabetes (T1D) in individuals with T1D autoantibodies.
Developed by Digostics, the test offers a simpler, less invasive alternative to clinic-based OGTTs. The study aims to assess its accuracy, usability, and acceptance, potentially paving the way for wider use in early T1D detection and monitoring.

There was no scientific advice to test all patients discharged from hospitals into care homes at the start of the Covid crisis, a former Welsh health minister has said.
Vaughan Gething, who was in the post when the pandemic struck, said that “with hindsight” testing everyone “could have reduced risk”.
In his fifth appearance at the Covid inquiry, he faced questions about the decision to discharge patients to prepare hospitals for an expected wave of coronavirus cases.

The King’s Fund has been advocating for a stronger focus in England on population health and supporting leaders to improve population health for several years now. This has centred on integration for health, as opposed to just integration of care and services.
That means coherence in policy and practice across the four key pillars of a population’s health: effort on the wider determinants (such as housing and inclusive economic growth); health behaviours; integration of care; and the role of communities themselves.
In principle, this is straightforward; in practice, it isn’t.

In 2024, AstraZeneca, Cambridge and the Medical Research Council established a new functional genomics laboratory on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
Part of the UK Human Functional Genomics Initiative, the lab is contributing to the UK’s ambition of having the most advanced genomic healthcare system in the world.
The laboratory provides researchers from across the UK with access to large-scale biological and technological tools and an advanced automated arrayed-CRISPR screening platform.

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