Prothea Technologies is a spinout company from the Universities of Edinburgh and Bath developing technology that promises to ‘see and treat’ diseased lung tissue in one hospital visit.
Lung cancer is the third most common cancer in the UK, with more than 48,000 new cases diagnosed per year. Nine out of ten patients do not survive more than ten years, with survival rates remaining stubbornly low for the last five decades.
Screening programmes aim to facilitate the early detection of suspicious lesions, but delivering value from these initiatives requires a significant increase in biopsy performance, presenting a challenge for hospitals already grappling with low biopsy yields and false negatives.
Technology to rapidly spot disease and treat it in the same procedure
Prothea’s innovations include a fibreoptic endoscope that allows biopsies to be visualised and tissue taken through a tiny catheter and an ultrafast imaging and data capture tool that offers live insights into the molecular makeup of the lesion. This will be combined with a technology that removes the cancerous tissue, making it easier to rapidly spot disease and treat it in the same procedure.
The Prothea team say their technology could alleviate hospital pressures and improve patient outcomes by enabling lung biopsy, diagnosis and treatment to be carried out in a single hospital visit, reducing time-to-treat from weeks to minutes.
10 years of hard work and collaboration
The ambitious spinout is the result of over 10 years of hard work and collaboration between the Universities of Edinburgh, Bath, Dundee and Durham, alongside NHS Lothian and Heriot-Watt University. Technologies have been developed with support from leading organisations including UK Research and Innovation, the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK.
Prothea was supported by a dedicated Deal Team at Edinburgh Innovations comprising the breadth of expertise needed to spin out a successful company. The Deal Team provided a forum that gave all parties involved an awareness of the necessary process and enabled quick and painless progression towards company formation and investment.
The company launched with a €12M Series A Round in April 2024, co-led by Earlybird Venture Capital and Mérieux Equity Partners, with participation from NRW Bank and Old College Capital, the University’s in-house venture investment fund.
Innovative technologies taken to patients in the first clinical trial
Enrolment is complete for the Precision Lung clinical trial at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. The trial has evaluated the safety and capability of Prothea’s novel metabolic imaging system to accurately locate the target lesion in patients requiring a biopsy following identification of an abnormality on a CT scan. The results of the study, co-sponsored by ACCORD (the joint research office between the University of Edinburgh and NHS Lothian) will be presented at the World Lung conference (12th-15th September 2026, Seoul).
Dr Adam Marshall, Principal Investigator in the Precision Lung clinical investigation and Consultant Physician in Respiratory Medicine at NHS Lothian, said:
Despite the introduction of many new technologies in recent years there are still patients around the world whose biopsies don’t provide sufficient tissue for the pathology they require. This novel technology clearly offers something different, and I hope that this study proves a satisfactory basis for further clinical investigations.”
The University of Edinburgh Centre for Inflammation Research
