Respiro Diagnostics has raised £1 million in a pre-seed round led by Zinc Venture Capital and SFC Capital, with participation from Amadeus Capital Partners, the Conception X Angel Syndicate, KQ Labs and strategic angel investors, and grant funding from Innovate UK. The funding will support Respiro's clinical research and the continued development of its device and laboratory processes, as it advances a breath-based liquid biopsy platform for the early, non-invasive detection of lung cancer and other diseases of the lung.
Lung cancer is the deadliest cancer, responsible for nearly one in five cancer deaths globally. Reliable diagnosis has depended on sampling the lung directly, which has meant invasive, high-risk tissue biopsies that can collapse a lung and often return too little tissue to act on. Blood-based tests that search for fragments of tumour DNA offer a less invasive alternative but miss the many tumours that shed too little DNA to detect. Caught between the two, more than half of patients are diagnosed at Stage IV, where five-year survival falls below 10%, and around half are never molecularly profiled, the step that determines whether targeted treatments shown to improve survival could work for them. Respiro's platform offers a non-invasive alternative built around a liquid breath sample collected in minutes. A patent-pending device captures biological material directly from exhaled breath, and a proprietary laboratory methodology profiles the DNA, RNA and protein within the sample, giving clinicians a route to earlier detection and more targeted treatment, and patients a meaningful chance of survival.
Proof of concept has already been demonstrated in initial testing with mesothelioma patients, and Respiro's first clinical study in lung cancer patients begins in September 2026 at Aalborg University Hospital in Denmark. Beyond lung cancer, the team is also exploring applications including pulmonary hypertension and asthma. The approach builds on co-founder Dr Theo Issitt's PhD in breath diagnostics at the University of York, and his postdoctoral research with Cancer Research UK and Imperial College London. Respiro's place on the KQ Labs programme, sponsored by Cancer Research Horizons, the innovation arm of Cancer Research UK, has also supported its development.
We're building Respiro hand in hand with the clinicians who will use it, because the best science means nothing if it doesn't hold up in a busy clinic. Our first study is designed to show that we can detect lung cancer and guide treatment decisions, and from there we'll progress towards other respiratory diseases. Our vision is simple: that one day, a breath sample is all it takes to know what's happening in your lungs - early, while there's still time to act.
The deeper I went into breath research, the more I kept hitting the same wall: the field was measuring the volatile gases the lung gives off, its by-products, when the lung is actually exhaling the biological material itself - the DNA, RNA and protein that reveal what's really happening. We decided to stop chasing the by-products and go after the source.
Respiro Diagnostics is exactly the type of businesses we back and help build in our Science-for-Impact portfolio. High calibre Founders with a commercial and scientific complementarity, and a platform that extends across respiratory disease for a multi-billion-dollar diagnostics opportunity. There is potential here to change how lung cancer is detected, before patients are diagnosed too late to be treated.
We're glad to back Theo and Alison. Theo built the product out of his own research, and Alison knows how to take health products from the lab into hospitals. Between them they combine the science and route to market, and we're looking forward to what comes next.
