{"entity":{"id":"anchordx-aurora","kind":"drug","name":"Aurora (AnchorDx)","aka":[],"tldr":"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.","status":"emerging","asOf":"2026-11-03","links":[{"label":"AnchorDx release, as summarised (25 June 2020)","url":"https://www.1stoncology.com/blog/?p=46876"},{"label":"Lei et al., American Journal of Cancer Research 2024 (colorectal and gastric)","url":"https://doi.org/10.62347/TPTQ3682"}],"tags":["test","mced","evidence:insufficient"],"related":[],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":["mced","liquid-biopsy","cfdna-methylation-testing"],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":["anchordx"],"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.","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)."],"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.","approvals":[],"mechanismSteps":[],"toxicity":[],"access":[],"regulatoryEvents":[]},"route":"/drugs/anchordx-aurora/","neighbours":{"technology":[{"id":"cfdna-methylation-testing","kind":"technology","name":"Cell-free DNA methylation tests","route":"/technologies/cfdna-methylation-testing/"},{"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/"}],"company":[{"id":"anchordx","kind":"company","name":"AnchorDx","route":"/companies/anchordx/"}]}}