{"entity":{"id":"inspector-mced","kind":"drug","name":"INSPECTOR methylation test (Geneplus)","aka":["Geneplus MCED","hTET-assisted methylation sequencing"],"tldr":"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.","status":"emerging","asOf":"2026-11-03","links":[{"label":"Luo et al., Cancer Communications 2025 (INSPECTOR)","url":"https://doi.org/10.1002/cac2.70071"}],"tags":["test","mced","evidence:insufficient"],"related":[],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":["mced","liquid-biopsy","cfdna-methylation-testing"],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":["geneplus"],"institutions":["sysucc"],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":["paper-inspector-geneplus-cancer-commun-2025"],"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.","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)."],"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.","approvals":[],"mechanismSteps":[],"toxicity":[],"access":[],"regulatoryEvents":[]},"route":"/drugs/inspector-mced/","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":"geneplus","kind":"company","name":"Geneplus-Beijing","route":"/companies/geneplus/"}],"institution":[{"id":"sysucc","kind":"institution","name":"Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center","route":"/institutions/sysucc/"}],"paper":[{"id":"paper-inspector-geneplus-cancer-commun-2025","kind":"paper","name":"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","route":"/key-papers/paper-inspector-geneplus-cancer-commun-2025/"}]}}