TRANSFORMATIVE NON-INVASIVE CAUSAL MECHANOSTICS PLATFORM TO EFFECTIVELY TRIAGE AND TREAT ENDOMETRIOSIS

Project Information

TRANSCEND

Grant agreement ID: 101217760

DOI

10.3030/101217760

EC signature date 29 May 2025

Start date 1 June 2025

End date 31 May 2027

Funded under

• The European Innovation Council (EIC)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 2 494 291,00

Coordinated by

PRECISIONLIFE LTD
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TRANSCEND (TRANSFORMATIVE NON-INVASIVE CAUSAL MECHANOSTICS PLATFORM TO EFFECTIVELY TRIAGE AND TREAT ENDOMETRIOSIS)

Reporting period: 2025-06-01 to 2026-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Over 300 million women experience chronic pelvic pain of which 190 million have endometriosis. Despite this, diagnosis of many of the common indications that cause women to experience chronic pelvic pain, including endometriosis, takes 8+ years from symptom onset. On average, affected women have twice as many medical consultations before receiving a diagnosis, and a significant number will require emergency room treatment. There’s a massive need for tools that not only enable earlier diagnosis, but also ensure more equitable, personalised, predictive, and preventative women's health.
TRANSCEND is a 2-year project in which PrecisionLife will develop and clinically validate a rapid, non-invasive precision medicine test to evaluate a patient’s risk of endometriosis and other diseases associated with chronic pelvic pain, and identify the mechanisms underpinning their disease. With this test, we aim to improve referral speed and accuracy for women with chronic pelvic pain, reducing waiting lists, unnecessary surgeries, and improving patient outcomes.
TRANSCEND will also enable testing of repurposing drug candidates identified by PrecisionLife in targeted groups of at-risk patients with endometriosis. These drugs have a clear genetic rationale and are supported by the mechanostic test that indicates which patients are most likely to benefit from them. This is the fastest and cheapest way to find medicines that will be effective for patients with endometriosis, whose current pharmaceutical options are limited to hormonal therapies with limited efficacy and significant side effects. This project also includes additional go-to-market activities that will support market targeting, engage clinicians and patient groups, and work with regulatory bodies to support approval and uptake.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

TRANSCEND has demonstrated robust technical and scientific progress the past 8 months, successfully completing many of the project deliverables and milestones, including several due in the next reporting period.
PrecisionLife demonstrated strong reproducibility of genomic disease signatures previously identified in a white European population (using UK Biobank data) within a diverse, multi-ancestry endometriosis cohort from the US All of Us (AoU) programme. The results have submitted to the Journal of Translational Medicine for peer review. Reproducibility rates were greatest for higher frequency signatures, ranging from 80-88% for signatures with greater than 9% frequency (p<0.01) in AoU. Encouragingly, the disease signatures also show high reproducibility rates in non-white European sub-cohorts. Significant progress has been made to access additional endometriosis and chronic pelvic pain populations from the US (Kaiser Permanente Research Bank) and UK (Genomics England) to conduct clinical validation studies of the mechanostic test due to start in the next reporting period.
PrecisionLife has established a network of scientific, clinical, and regulatory advisors, strengthening the project's foundation for future research and validation activities. We have compiled a shortlist of drug repurposing candidates with promising mechanism-of-action biology in endometriosis and strong reproducibility in the AoU cohort. These under review by key opinion leaders (KOLs) to ensure robust scientific evaluation. These developments strengthen the project's potential for clinical impact and provide a strong foundation for the next 8-month period.
Recognition at academic and industry events highlights the scientific excellence and relevance of the TRANSCEND project. Two abstracts describing this work were selected for oral presentation at the European Endometriosis Congress (EEC2026), including a ‘Best Abstracts Submitted’ award. PrecisionLife also won the ‘Best Project’ award at the Innovate UK endometriosis hackathon based on this work.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Current treatment is often limited to symptom management or broad hormonal therapies. TRANSCEND proposes mechanism-specific therapeutics, offering the potential for significantly better responses and avoidance of unnecessary treatment. This could also enable smaller, more efficient clinical trials, faster drug approval pathways, and expanded treatment portfolios specifically tailored to patient biology.
TRANSCEND’s precision medicine test will uncover the biological mechanisms driving their form of disease. This goes beyond symptom detection to focus on causal mechanistic disease signatures rather than proxy indicators, such as blood tests or imaging. It will stratify patients into mechanistically distinct disease subtypes, which allows tailored treatment decisions, including the selection of PrecisionLife’s repurposed drugs. TRANSCEND will enable clinical validation of the test’s predictive accuracy and the efficacy of the repurposing drug candidates.
Clinical adoption depends not only scientific and clinical validation, but also successful navigation of regulatory, reimbursement, and commercial processes to achieve widespread clinical use and impact. Phase 2 of TRANSCEND will generate this supporting evidence. We will utilise our stakeholder networks and formal advisory board, to identify and overcome these barriers to clinical adoption. This will involve patients in product co-design and collaboration with policymakers to emphasise the product’s ROI in relation to regional policy factors and approvals.
We're building a Target Product Profile to help shape our market plans and make it easier to talk with key stakeholders. We're also actively engaging with regulators to support regulatory and reimbursement discussions.