EDX Medical Group plc (AQSE:EDX) Founder and Chief Scientific Officer Professor Chris Evans caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss what the company does, its new super-test for prostate cancer, when these tests will be available to the public, its strong Board & interesting investors, ambitions for the company, and what investors can expect over the coming months.
Q1: Chris, before we talk about the news, can you just remind us what EDX Medical Groop does and how it was founded?
A1: It was created in 2022 in Cambridge, built laboratories, equipped them very quickly with very sophisticated equipment to build a digital diagnostics company to focus on cancer, cardiovascular and infectious disease, mostly cancer.
The aim was to come up with highly innovative tests. We’re not interested in me-too tests that are copying other people and are marginally better. We’re trying to come up with a range of tests that are very, if need be, sophisticated, extremely accurate, precision diagnostics, which can generate quite a lot of data for the clinician and the doctor, all from one sample, be it blood, be it saliva, be it urine or whatever.
So, that’s been the aim of the company from day one. We have a good several projects underway in the company. We have some products which are about to be for sale imminently in cancer and we’ve had some pretty good breakthroughs, and we got more to come.
Q2: Now, you’ve announced that EDX has developed a new super test for prostate cancer. Can you tell us more about the test and why it’s better than anything else on the market?
A2: It’s interesting, prostate cancer, because it’s one of these cancers where it lurks, and it can be hidden with no symptoms at all. As the world has learned very recently with Sir Chris Hoy, who obviously was unaware that he was carrying stage four late-stage terminal prostate cancer. A very fit, athletic guy who had obviously a pain in his shoulder, which turned out to be secondary metastasis tumours, led all the way back from his primary, which was in his prostate.
So, to catch people like Chris very, very early, at stage one, where the prognosis is excellent and there are all manner of treatments that could eliminate the cancer with someone like Chris early, you need to be able to screen people and pluck them out pretty early. So, for me, the ultimate was to devise a test, which should be done with all men between the age of 45 and 90 years old and do it once a year.
But that test needs to be very, very accurate because the current test PSA, which, by the way, is just one biomarker, one single protein, is about 43-48% accurate at best. 70-80% of all the men who have a high PSA reading who would be having panic attacks, 70-80% of them do not have cancer, and then there are 14-15% of men who have a very low reading, so they’re happy as Larry and straight down the pub, not knowing they could be carrying a very aggressive cancer, which has masked the PSA reading.
PSA is just not reliable, that’s well known to everybody, all clinicians, etc. MRI is a very good tool, MRI is able to screen your prostate and if it can visibly see the tumour, it doesn’t know if the tumour is a really active cancer, a slow-growing cancer, a benign tumour or a very aggressive cancer about to break out and run riot. So, you end up with biopsies, which are obviously long needles stabbing your prostate, taking samples so they can look at them under the microscope. That’s the current journey.
What we’ve come up with here in EDX is a test that no one has ever seen, I think, anything like this before. We have over 100 biomarkers. So, that’s 100 types of PSAs and all of these biomarkers, be they genes, genetics, some hereditary, others transcriptomics, RNAs, proteomics, proteins, which are products of some of these mutated genes, we have epigenes, which are the methylated, active lit up part of the genome. All of these biomarkers are associated in some way or other with prostate cancer.
Now, some of these markers should not be there at high levels, some shouldn’t be there at low levels, some shouldn’t be there at all, and we look at the ratios of these different markers. So, what we’ve designed is a brilliant algorithm. We have quite a unique algorithm, which we’ve patented, and we can feed in all of the hundreds of bits of data from the 100 biomarkers into the algorithm.
The algorithm is then able to output a very simple set of results or information for the doctor that says this has a 96-99% certainty of no cancer or it is cancer, and it is slow-growing cancer, or it is very aggressive cancer, it’s hereditary genes, hereditary genetics are present, etc. We provide all that information to the doctor as the end product, which in simplistic terms.
Q3: When and how will prostate tests be available to the public, do you think?
A3: We’ve now got another 10 or 12 months, what I call to finish the project before we would launch the product. We’ve done, obviously, a lot of the work, which is why we’re able to go public and announce the data we’ve got. We will do more of what we call validation work for the regulators, for the MHRA and for the MHRA to register the product.
The product will then be ready for launch, maybe at the end of this year, if things go very well, be great to have it launched at Christmas. Otherwise, it will be in the first quarter of 2026 and then we will almost certainly put the product into the private market first because it can be taken up by many, many tens or hundreds of thousands of men pretty quickly.
That’s very important, actually, for the NHS, that these private individuals are enabling us to collect very important information that they do or do not have cancer and what type of cancer. What we’re doing is stress testing our actual brilliant product to see whether we can even, through the algorithm, get this to 99% or 100% accuracy, we will then report all of that data through ultimately to the NHS and to the people running the TRANSFoRM project and everywhere else at the government backs.
We can then have discussions with the NHS because the biggest discussions would be what’s called clinical benefit versus pricing so cost benefits are very important, they’re less important in the private markets, but more important in the public NHS market, which is certainly understandable.
So, I doubt this test will be available to the NHS till later in 2026, but we certainly hope to get it into the world market at the end of this year, early part next year.
Q4: EDX Medical Group has a strong Board and some very interesting investors. Can you tell us more about them?
A4: It’s myself and Trevor Jones, one of my senior independent non-executives, me and Trevor worked together over 33/34 years. We’ve built literally more than a dozen, 15 companies together, biotech companies which have been listed in the UK and listed abroad stock markets, they’ve been acquired so these are all startup companies which are eventually cumulatively have been sold for billions of dollars. Very proud. They’ve made products that sell for hundreds of millions per annum and drugs that are now out there in the cancer markets doing things.
So, me and Trevor’s experience together is very close and then the Chief Exec, Mike Hudson, we went to university together 47/48 years ago, so we’ve known each other ever since then. Mike was far more studious than me, I was far more applied than him, which meant I went to the union bar more than he did, but at the end of the day, 48 years later, here we are still working with each other. We’ve done lots of companies together, and I think me, Mike, and Trevor Jones know each other extremely well.
We brought in, deliberately, an independent, excellent Chairman in Jason Holt, ex-Virgin Atlantic, has worked for the government and various people. Trevor and Jason are very, very strong on organisation and formality in governance and Jason is very, very good on audits as well so he’s a good financial Chairman.
Recently, we’ve announced Martin Walton, who’s also worked with me for 25 years, and myself and Martin have built some very big and successful companies, public and private, and funds together.
So, we are a pretty close-knit team. This is my fourth decade of doing this so I’m quite excited to have a tent full of friends who I know extremely well, I know their strengths and weaknesses, and we work extremely well together.
Underneath, as you rightly pointed out, we have probably the most interesting cadre of investors that any biotech startup has ever seen. We’ve probably got several Knights of the Realm, Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sir Tom Hunter, Sir Tony Gallagher, they’re all in here. Some fabulous, very successful entrepreneurs, a number of billionaires, we have Peter Kelly, who built Softcat, an amazing individual as well. Obviously, Sir Tom Hunter and Steve Morgan themselves have built literally billions of dollars in enterprises, which are very successful.
They’re all very hard-nosed businessmen, they know their onions, they know what they’re investing in, but they want to make a difference as well. So, they were keen to get involved with myself in this sort of company where we can develop tests to make a real difference to the community, to mankind, and develop real products. I have done this for some of these individuals in the past. I’ve made them have very, very good returns, some of them five/ten times their investment in other projects so they tend to follow me more than they do other people, and I intend to do it again with this one.
So, it’s a very exciting group of investors, actually, and that’s where we are currently.
We will intend to open this up to the AIM market. We’re on AQUIS, obviously, trading now but that will be where we will end up because there are a number of institutions who have approached me wanting to buy into EDX, and they don’t have a mandate to be able to buy into EDX on AQUIS. So, we do need an AIM listing to be able to do that, so that’s coming down the track as well.
Q5: What are the ambitions for the company now, and what can investors expect over the coming months?
A5: Well, you’re going to hear more news because these projects, like the Prostate project, which was maybe 18 months ago, as we began to formulate the design of the product, we’ve obviously started at least 10 others, and they’ve all been running in parallel.
Some of the other projects will finish, maybe five or six of them will finish in 2025 and become registered MHRA-approved products, and some of them FDA. So, they’ll be made available. We will then start selling and marketing, doing deals with partners and distributors with all of these projects. The early range of products are mostly cancer, and then there’s some great infectious disease, a brilliant sepsis product coming through as well. We hope by mid-2026, next year and a half, we will have a whole range of these products finished, registered, regulated, and launched internationally, UK, Europe, and possibly America as well.
So, all of that is coming down the track in 2025. We have some very exciting potential partnerships in China, where there are some unbelievably brilliant innovations in diagnostics and testing. They need companies such as EDX to be able to bring those innovations into the Western world, into the Western markets as EDX tests, so we are in discussions with those as well. All of that will get revealed during this year.
So, it’s going to be, I think, quite a newsworthy, exciting year for the company. You’ll hear more about the prostate test, of course, as we get close to launching that one, which should be very exciting and then some of the other ones we’ll reveal as we go along.
We’ve got some big partnerships already with companies like Caris and with Thermo Fisher, as you were aware so very proud, actually, that as a young company, barely two years old, we’ve got some very credible, reputable partners involved with us. Very credible, reputable investors, a great Board but most importantly, we have a pipeline of excellent projects, ideas, innovations. Dare I say it, they’re all working, all of them are working and it’s only a matter of time before we finish them all and launch them so keep watching us.
