{"entity":{"id":"aminoindex-cancer-screening","kind":"drug","name":"AminoIndex Cancer Screening (AICS)","aka":[],"tldr":"Ajinomoto's Japanese blood test that ranks the risk of several cancers separately from amino acid levels; in a validation of 10,245 people it found 34 cancers.","summary":"In Mikami et al. (Scientific Reports 2019), the total cancer detection rate was 0.33% (34 of 10,245); rank C sensitivity for cancer diagnosed within one year was 83.3% (10 of 12) for gastric, 50.0% for lung, 46.2% for colorectal, 50.0% for prostate, 43.8% for breast and 50.0% (1 of 2) for uterine or ovarian cancer. The UK NIHR systematic review notes that it screens for individual cancers separately, so no overall performance statistics exist. Regulatory status and price were not researched for this census.","status":"emerging","asOf":"2026-10-29","links":[{"label":"Mikami et al., Scientific Reports 2019","url":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-50304-y"},{"label":"Wade et al., Health Technology Assessment 2025 (systematic review)","url":"https://doi.org/10.3310/dlmt1294"}],"tags":["test","mced","evidence:insufficient"],"related":[],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":["mced","liquid-biopsy"],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"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.","Sensitivities rest on small numbers (2 to 16 cancers per type).","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)."],"brand":"AminoIndex","modality":"Cancer risk blood test (plasma free amino acids), separate scores per cancer","mechanism":"Measures free amino acids in plasma and gives a separate risk rank (A, B or C) for each of several cancers; it is a set of single-cancer risk scores rather than one multi-cancer result.","approvals":[],"mechanismSteps":[],"toxicity":[],"access":[],"regulatoryEvents":[]},"route":"/drugs/aminoindex-cancer-screening/","neighbours":{"technology":[{"id":"liquid-biopsy","kind":"technology","name":"Liquid biopsy (ctDNA)","route":"/technologies/liquid-biopsy/"},{"id":"mced","kind":"technology","name":"Multi-cancer early detection (MCED)","route":"/technologies/mced/"}]}}