PrecisionLife's EIC Accelerator Swabs for Endometriosis

Endometriosis affects about 200 million women worldwide, takes eight years and more than ten medical consultations to diagnose, and the definitive test is a laparoscopy. Up to 60% of cases go undiagnosed, and the CORDIS summary of PrecisionLife's EIC project puts the cost to Europe at €70 billion a year. The company, based at Long Hanborough in Oxfordshire, proposes a cheek swab: genotype the cells, look for what it calls disease signatures, combinations of genetic variants predictive of endometriosis, and use them both to triage patients and to pick a drug.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, TRANSCEND, at its October 2024 cut-off as a grant-only award, and CORDIS records €2,494,291 from June 2025 to May 2027, shared with PrecisionLife entities in Poland and Denmark. The project builds on FEMaLe, a Horizon 2020 project on finding endometriosis with machine learning, and its deliverables are certification of the diagnostic as a Class C device under the EU in vitro diagnostics regulation and evidence that the repurposed drugs work.

Signatures, not a single gene

PrecisionLife's method is combinatorial: rather than looking for one variant associated with disease, it searches for combinations of variants that together predict it, which it says also point to the biological mechanism and therefore to drugs. The company has identified both the signatures and repurposed drug candidates, and CORDIS puts the work at technology readiness level 6. The test is designed around existing predicate devices, which the company argues should speed certification in the EU and US.

What does not exist in public is a number. No sensitivity, no specificity, no positive predictive value, in any population. The funding is explicitly to validate and optimise the signatures in datasets of diverse ancestries and then to test predictive accuracy in clinical trials, as an April 2025 interview with the company's product strategy lead in The Pathologist set out. For a triage test, those numbers are the product.

The Oxford dataset matters

In June 2023 the company licensed OXEGENE from the University of Oxford, anonymised genotype data from 1,000 patients whose endometriosis was confirmed surgically, with disease stage and infertility status recorded. Surgical confirmation is what makes such a dataset valuable: in a disease that takes years to diagnose, most patient records are uncertain, and a genetic signature trained on uncertain labels inherits that uncertainty.

A thousand patients is also small for discovering combinatorial signatures and then proving them, which is why validation across other cohorts is the work the grant funds. CORDIS shows no periodic report.

1. Disease signatures identifiedReportedTRL 6 per CORDIS, built on the FEMaLe project and OXEGENE data.
2. Validation across diverse ancestriesFundedThe stated purpose of the grant; no results.
3. Published predictive accuracyNoneNo sensitivity or specificity figures in public.
4. IVDR Class C certificationNot obtainedA deliverable due by May 2027.

A €251 million projection

The commercial figures in the application are large: €251 million of revenue and €171 million of net profit by year five after the project, with the team growing to 73 people, in a global market the project puts at €4 billion. Those are the company's projections, written for a grant application, and they describe a certified test selling across Europe and the US, which is several regulatory steps beyond where the project stands.

A disease Europe has decided to take seriously

Endometriosis has moved up the European health agenda, with national strategies in France and elsewhere and EU-funded research including FEMaLe, because the economics are as bad as the medicine: years of lost work, repeated consultations and surgery that is sometimes unnecessary. A cheap swab that reliably told a GP whom to refer would change that pathway, which is why the EIC funded both the diagnostic and the drug repurposing in one project. The test also has to clear the EU's in vitro diagnostics regulation, which has made Class C certification slower and more expensive than it used to be.