Hormones control almost everything in your body, from how you process food to how you handle stress. But when hormone levels get disrupted, the symptoms are often so broad and confusing that getting a correct diagnosis takes a lot of time and money.

Now, a new spin-out company from the University of Birmingham and Imperial College London is trying to solve this problem. The company, called IMS Solutions, just launched with £1.1 million in seed funding to commercialize a groundbreaking “steroid fingerprinting” technology. It relies on artificial intelligence to radically speed up the diagnosis of complex hormonal conditions.

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A Smarter Way To Screen For Cancer

The first major product IMS Solutions is bringing to the market focuses on adrenal tumors. Right now, if a standard scan of your chest or abdomen shows an adrenal tumor—which happens to about 5% of patients—it is very difficult to tell if it is benign or if it is a rare, aggressive cancer called Adrenocortical Carcinoma (ACC).

To get a better answer, IMS Solutions developed a specialized urine test called ACCelerate. It works by combining a unique panel of biological markers with a machine learning algorithm. The AI analyzes the data to detect a specific, malignant “steroid fingerprint.” In multi-center studies, this combination proved to be up to four times more accurate than relying on traditional hospital scans alone. The goal is to quickly identify the patients who actually need surgery while sparing those whose tumors are harmless.

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Targeting Better Treatment

The company is also working on a blood test aimed at Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome (PMOS). This complex condition comes with a significantly raised risk of long-term health issues like type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease. By using a similar machine learning approach, the new test is designed for standard primary care clinics. It will help doctors easily stratify PMOS patients to get them on the right treatment plans much earlier.

As for the cancer screening tool, the new funding will help the company finalize its regulatory certifications so the test can be reliably performed in existing hospital laboratories without requiring expensive new equipment.

“We validated the test through the largest ever adrenal cancer study, which involved over 2,000 patients from 11 countries, and this proved the test’s accuracy. The funding means we can now optimise the test and certify to current regulatory standards,” says Professor Wiebke Arlt, Chief Scientific Officer at IMS Solutions.