TRANSCEND

Ixion2Complex chronic diseases like endometriosis consume 75% of Europe’s healthcare budget. Endometriosis is a painful condition in which the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus. It affects 200 million women worldwide at the peak of their productive and reproductive years and costs Europe €70bn per year. As with other complex chronic diseases, endometriosis results from multiple combinations of genetic and clinical factors, making it difficult to diagnose and treat. On average it takes 8 years to diagnose, typically involving +10 medical consultations. The current diagnostic standard is laparoscopy - an invasive, expensive and painful surgery. Neither non-invasive, accurate early-diagnostic tools nor effective treatments currently exist for endometriosis. As much as 60% of endometriosis cases are undiagnosed. As such, a pressing medical need exists for an affordable and scalable precision diagnostic solution to guide personalised treatments. Building on successful results from our Horizon 2020 collaborative project, this EIC Accelerator project will clinically validate the world’s first accurate, cost-effective, scalable and simple to use diagnostic test to predict an individual's risk of developing endometriosis based on the underlying causal mechanisms of the disease. Using these novel insights, this project will demonstrate how the diagnostic can be used to target clinically repurposed drugs to successfully treat specific disease subtypes. Having identified critical disease signatures and potential drug candidates to repurpose (TRL6 achieved), EIC support is essential to certify our novel diagnostic as a Class C IVDR device and prove the efficacy of repurposed drugs to treat endometriosis for a €2.9bn global market. Overcoming these remaining risky and challenging barriers will enable us to achieve €133m in revenues, €80m in net profits and grow our highly skilled team to 85 FTEs by Y5 post-project, thereby realising our full commercial potential.