Birmingham university spin-out secures £1.1m to develop new hormone diagnostic tests

A new spin-out company from the University of Birmingham and Imperial College London has launched with £1.1 million in seed funding to develop diagnostic tests for conditions involving disordered steroid hormone metabolism.

Intelligent Mass Spec Solutions Ltd (IMS Solutions) has been founded to commercialise a platform technology that detects unique steroid signatures in urine and blood, aiming to speed up diagnosis of conditions that often present with diffuse and hard-to-pinpoint symptoms.

The seed round was led by Midlands Mindforge, with a syndicate including SFC Capital, the UK's Innovation and Seed Capital Fund (UKI2S, managed by Future Planet Capital), NG Bio, British Business Bank and private investors.

The company is further supported by a £2.1 million grant from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), awarded to Imperial College London.

The funding will enable IMS Solutions to develop a urine test for the early diagnosis of Adrenocortical Carcinoma (ACC), a rare and difficult-to-treat cancer, with a UK launch targeted for 2029.

The company is also working on what it says will be the world's first stratification test for Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome (PMOS), the most common hormone disorder in women, affecting an estimated 10-15% of the female population globally.

Dr Martin Whitaker, chief executive of IMS Solutions, said: “IMS Solutions is launching with a strong commercial and scientific team, and a well-advanced roadmap for products that align with current demands from patients, clinicians and healthcare providers.”

Priya Reddy, investor at Midlands Mindforge, said: “Women's health conditions such as PMOS have historically been significantly underfunded and underserved, despite affecting millions of women globally.

“IMS has the potential to change that by enabling faster, more accurate route to diagnosis and, ultimately, better patient outcomes.”

The technology was developed at the University of Birmingham by Professor Wiebke Arlt (pictured), who becomes chief scientific officer at IMS Solutions.

Professor Arlt is director of the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences and head of department at the Institute of Clinical Sciences at Imperial College London, and is the first female president of the European Society of Endocrinology.

The company’s first product, the ACCelerate™ test, will help clinicians discriminate between benign and malignant adrenal tumours, which are found in around five per cent of people undergoing a chest or abdomen scan.

The test combines a panel of biomarkers with a machine learning algorithm, and has already been validated in a multi-centre study of more than 2,000 patients across 11 countries, showing it to be up to four times more accurate than scans alone.

Professor Arlt said: “We validated the test through the largest ever adrenal cancer study.

“The funding means we can now optimise the test and certify to current regulatory standards, and show that it can be reliably performed in existing NHS laboratories, without new machines or additional costs.”

The company is also progressing a clinical validation study for its PMOS test, with results expected shortly.