Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Oral evidence: Innovation showcase, HC 523
Wednesday 4 March 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 4 March 2026.
Members present: Dame Chi Onwurah (Chair); Dr Allison Gardner; Freddie van Mierlo; Samantha Niblett; Dr Lauren Sullivan; Adam Thompson; Martin Wrigley; Daniel Zeichner.
Question 53
Witness
I: Hendrik Runge, CEO, Cambridge Nucleomics.
Witness: Hendrik Runge.
Chair: Welcome to our innovation showcase. The Committee wants to understand how the UK supports innovators and what more can be done. To inform our work, each week we select an innovator to share their story before our main session. Daniel Zeichner suggested this week’s innovator, so I will ask Daniel to introduce them.
Q53 Daniel Zeichner: Thank you very much, Chair, and good morning. Thank you, Hendrik for coming and presenting to us today. In some ways, I would say you are a classic Cambridge story. You did your PhD at the University of Cambridge, researching novel therapeutic approaches to treat blood cancers using next-generation sequencing and functional genomics, and then working with Professor Ulrich Keyser, the inventor of a revolutionary modular soluble nanoarray technology for RNA detection. You then founded Cambridge Nucleomics to develop novel diagnostic tools addressing speed and cost constraints of existing methods, and, from that spin-out—I think this will be of interest to everyone—developed a one-hour sepsis test, replacing the current two-day test, to help vulnerable patients with blood poisoning, and a pipeline of oncology tests based on that RNA detection platform technology.
We see many brilliant cases like this, but I am delighted that you have agreed to come and talk to us today about how you have done it and perhaps some of the challenges you have faced. Over to you.
Hendrik Runge: Thank you, Daniel. Dear Chair and Committee members, thank you for your interest in our work and your determination to foster innovation and growth. I am Dr Hendrik Runge, CEO of Cambridge Nucleomics, a spin-out from the University of Cambridge. We develop fast, actionable diagnostic tests that improve the selection of therapies and patient outcomes.
Sepsis is when an infection becomes so severe that the pathogens—usually, bacteria or fungi—enter your bloodstream. It is an emergency and a global health crisis. It is responsible for one in five deaths worldwide—11 million per year, and 50,000 in the UK alone. We do have good drugs to treat patients, but we lack good tests to detect the disease early enough. With sepsis, the survival rate is 80% in the first hour but only 25% 12 hours later, yet current tests take days. This leaves doctors scrambling—essentially guessing, in the absence of data—to decide how best to treat their patients, based on gut feeling.
This is the problem we are solving. Our tests will detect and identify the underlying pathogen in just one hour—fully automated and directly from blood. Crucially, this saves lives but also reduces the hands-on time for overworked NHS staff to just five minutes per patient.
But how big a problem is sepsis really? Let me tell you about 18-year-old Molly. She survived cancer, but chemotherapy weakened her immune system. She developed an infection, which escalated into her bloodstream, and she developed sepsis. Molly survived cancer, but she died from sepsis. This could have been prevented if she had received the right treatment early enough.
Some 250,000 people develop sepsis in the UK annually. By targeting immunocompromised patients first, who are highly susceptible to fungal infections, which are very hard to detect with conventional methods, our tests will directly benefit tens of thousands of British cancer patients and cancer survivors like Molly every year.
Beyond the tragic loss of life, sepsis costs the NHS £2 billion, and the wider UK economy £11 billion, every year. Many companies have tried to solve this, but they failed because they relied on legacy technologies like PCR and sequencing. Fundamental chemistry dictates that these tests will always take several hours, which is too slow.
We are completely different. We invented a hybridisation-based nanoarray that detects pathogen RNA without the need for slow chemical reactions. Instead, it binds to the target shape using nanotechnology. This enables us to run the detection in mere minutes, and the entire test, including the automated sample processing, in sub one hour.
The technology enabling this radically novel approach took us 12 years to develop. Finding pathogen RNA in blood is a “needle in a haystack” problem, because human material outweighs the pathogen material by about 1 billion to one. Essentially, we burn the hay and search the ashes with a strong, highly specific molecular magnet that is able to distinguish 50 different types of needles.
The world-leading science was developed right here in the UK, at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, by my co-founder, Professor Ulrich Keyser, who you mentioned, and it is protected by two patents. It is so revolutionary that industry veterans like the former CEO of Solexa, the UK’s most innovative next-generation sequencing company—now Illumina—got involved.
It was Cambridge’s world-leading ecosystem and legacy of innovation that made this possible, but translating this science into global impact is where some of the issues occur, and we encountered some hurdles. While Cambridge and London is arguably the best ecosystem in Europe for biotech start-ups, its domestic funding and risk appetite are dwarfed by the US. Bureaucracy and visa restrictions delay progress in an industry where time is money and money is life. We are in a global war for capital and a global war for the brightest minds, and we must ensure that the UK remains attractive and competitive.
For example, while safety and ethics are non-negotiable, we have to reduce the administrative overhead. When it takes eight weeks of paperwork just to test 10 ml of volunteer blood, our international competitors move faster and beat us to the punch. Similarly, bureaucratic friction around the EIS, while brilliantly intentioned, can severely delay funding or disincentivise overseas investors. We need regulations suited for real-world agility. I do not want our tax money to be wasted—I pay taxes too—but we have to ensure that it reaches our most innovative companies.
Let me end on a positive note. Despite these challenges, we have built a successful start-up, raised £700,000 in funding and are rapidly approaching technology milestones for a major funding round. We will be raising more over the summer. We employ five scientists, all with PhDs, and are already generating export revenue. The wide applicability of our technology platform enables us to generate an entire pipeline of diagnostic tests, with our next target antimicrobial resistance, which I am sure you are aware is a huge problem, and oncology testing for personalised therapies our next frontier. Our goal is to provide actionable diagnostic insights that improve survival by combining world-leading precision and speed.
We are driving UK economic growth and, with your support in streamlining the innovation pathway, we will build a sovereign British industry that saves thousands of lives. Thank you for helping us thrive. You can find more information and contact details on our website, cambridge-nucleomics.com. Do reach out. Supporting life science innovation means saving lives. Thank you.
Chair: Thank you very much, Dr Runge. I think I speak for the entire Committee in saying how impressive it is to hear about your technology and your innovation, and how concerning it is to hear about the extent of the impact of sepsis in the UK and worldwide. The points you made with regard to bureaucracy and incentives for investment are areas that the Committee is very interested in and will be taking up. Thank you very much for your presentation; it has been illuminating and inspiring.