# Aurora (AnchorDx)

Source: https://onco.cc/drugs/anchordx-aurora/  
OnCo record `anchordx-aurora` (Test). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

A methylation blood test for six common cancers announced by AnchorDx of Guangzhou in 2020 at a target cost of about $100; whether it reached the market could not be confirmed.

## Summary

AnchorDx, a Guangzhou diagnostics company, announced Aurora in a press release of 25 June 2020 as a methylated circulating tumour DNA test for lung, breast, colorectal, gastric, oesophageal and liver cancer, which it said make up 65% of new cancer cases in China, at a cost as low as $100; the release gave no accuracy figures. The closest peer-reviewed work found is an AnchorDx-authored two-cancer study (Lei et al., American Journal of Cancer Research 2024: 407 plasma samples, colorectal and gastric cancer), which reported 81.3% sensitivity at 80% specificity in its validation set, a specificity far too low for screening. No launch, regulatory status or price after 2020 was found.

## Fields

- Kind: Test
- Status: emerging
- Last checked: 2026-11-03
- Tags: test; mced; evidence:insufficient
- Brand: Aurora
- Modality: Multi-cancer early detection blood test in development (cell-free DNA methylation)
- Mechanism: Reads methylated circulating tumour DNA in blood, as the company described it in 2020; AnchorDx has published single-cancer methylation assays for lung, bladder, kidney and colorectal cancer.

## Notes

- Evidence grade insufficient for the claim that taking this test reduces late-stage diagnosis or cancer deaths: no randomised trial of it has reported either outcome, and its published performance comes from case-control or single-arm studies. The only randomised result for any multi-cancer test, NHS-Galleri, did not show fewer stage III or IV cancers.
- Status after the 2020 announcement is unknown.
- What a result means: a positive result is a reason for further tests, not a diagnosis; a negative result does not rule cancer out and does not replace the screening tests that have been shown to work (bowel, breast, cervical and, where eligible, lung screening).

## Sources

- AnchorDx release, as summarised (25 June 2020): https://www.1stoncology.com/blog/?p=46876
- Lei et al., American Journal of Cancer Research 2024 (colorectal and gastric): https://doi.org/10.62347/TPTQ3682

## Connected records

- technologies: [Cell-free DNA methylation tests](https://onco.cc/technologies/cfdna-methylation-testing/), [Liquid biopsy (ctDNA)](https://onco.cc/technologies/liquid-biopsy/), [Multi-cancer early detection (MCED)](https://onco.cc/technologies/mced/)
- companies: [AnchorDx](https://onco.cc/companies/anchordx/)

---
JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/anchordx-aurora.json