Office for Life Sciences’ Cancer Healthcare Goals – Tackling cancer by catalysing innovation

Do you have a cancer detection or diagnostic idea? 

Are you interested in participating in or informing the development of innovative approaches through collaborative R&D?

Then join us for one of three cross-disciplinary collaborative sandpits focused on driving the early detection and diagnosis of cancer. 

The Cancer Healthcare Goals, delivered as one of the Office for Life Sciences’ Healthcare Goals programmes, is aiming to incentivise the development of innovations that will improve early diagnosis rates for cancer patients. Each sandpit will have a different theme, guided by demand within the NHS to ensure that the events encourage participants to address the most pressing issues in the early diagnosis of cancer. 

These sandpits aim to bring participants together to form cross-sector consortia ahead of the anticipated launch of an early cancer diagnosis funding call (subject to Business Case approval), potentially covering the evaluation of early cancer diagnosis innovations, including for the detection of less common cancers. 

Who is this for? 

We are looking for representatives from: 

• academia 
• the NHS (including clinicians) 
• innovators (SMEs) 
• cancer research charities and third sector organisations 
• investors 
• funding bodies 

15 January 2026, Early detection of less common cancers 

Help develop innovative technologies to tackle the most pressing challenges in driving earlier diagnosis of less common cancers, including but not limited to brain, gynaecological, sarcoma, haematological and hepato-pancreato-biliary cancers. 

22 January 2026, Improving patient access to diagnostic tests 

This sandpit will guide you to collaborate widely and explore innovative solutions to empower patients and primary care teams to act earlier and identify more people with early symptoms while balancing the risks of over-referral and overwhelming services. Themes will include novel tests and technologies and health systems and pathways research, including (but not limited to) self-assessment tools, pharmacy-led triage, and direct-to-test pathways.  

12 February 2026, Multi-factorial testing for early cancer detection 

Aiming to increase the number of cancers diagnosed in the earliest stages, this sandpit will focus on multi-modal approaches to early detection, assessing an individual’s cancer risk by considering multiple factors including genomic, demographic, imaging and biomarkers, as well as multianalyte combinations.