# INSPECTOR methylation test (Geneplus)

Source: https://onco.cc/drugs/inspector-mced/  
OnCo record `inspector-mced` (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 eight cancers from Geneplus-Beijing and Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center, which found about eight in ten cancers in people already diagnosed; it has not been tested in a screening population.

## Summary

In the INSPECTOR study (Luo et al., Cancer Communications 2025), multicentre case-control cohorts of 1,071, 581 and 824 participants were used for training, validation and independent validation. In independent validation the test had 99.0% specificity and 81.9% sensitivity for eight cancers (lung, breast, colorectum, liver, oesophagus, stomach, pancreas, ovary); sensitivity was 65.5% at stage I and 79.7% at stage II, and the top predicted origin was correct in 87.4%. No product name, regulatory status, price or screening-population study was found.

## Fields

- Kind: Test
- Status: emerging
- Last checked: 2026-11-03
- Also known as: Geneplus MCED; hTET-assisted methylation sequencing
- Tags: test; mced; evidence:insufficient
- Brand: INSPECTOR
- Modality: Multi-cancer early detection blood test in development (enzyme-assisted cell-free DNA methylation sequencing)
- Mechanism: Converts cell-free DNA with a human TET enzyme rather than bisulphite and sequences 155,362 methylated CpG sites deeply, with a separate model for the cancer signal origin.

## 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.
- The stage I figure comes from people already diagnosed and is likely to fall in screening.
- 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

- Luo et al., Cancer Communications 2025 (INSPECTOR): https://doi.org/10.1002/cac2.70071

## 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: [Geneplus-Beijing](https://onco.cc/companies/geneplus/)
- institutions: [Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center](https://onco.cc/institutions/sysucc/)
- key papers: [The INSPECTOR study: enhanced feasibility for clinical translation of a multi-cancer early detection method based on enzyme-assisted high signal-to-noise ratio sequencing of methylated circulating tumor DNA](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-inspector-geneplus-cancer-commun-2025/)

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