UK-based Lucida Medical has raised £8.7m ($11.4m) to advance its artificial intelligence (AI)-based software for prostate cancer diagnosis.
VC firm IW Capital served as Lucida’s lead investor, while Lucida’s existing investors, XTX Ventures and Macmillan Cancer Support, also participated.
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Lucida’s Prostate Intelligence (Pi) AI platform is designed to assist clinicians in identifying prostate cancer from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, with the aim of improving the speed and diagnostic accuracy in identifying the disease and reducing unnecessary tests and biopsies.
Lucida plans to use the funds to support a future regulatory submission of Pi with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and to expand the platform into additional cancer types.
Currently involved in a pilot trial at 15 UK National Health Service (NHS) sites, including Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Lucida highlighted that with a 30% shortfall in clinical radiologists across the UK, as per estimates from the Royal College of Radiologists, cancer scans are taking longer to read across the UK. This can result in later-stage diagnoses and higher treatment complexity and cost.
Dr Antony Rix, CEO of Lucida Medical, said: “Cancer imaging volumes are rising rapidly, but reporting capacity is not keeping pace. Our goal is to give clinicians faster, more confident decisions while reducing unnecessary interventions for patients.”
The current state of prostate cancer detection in the UK
According to research by Macmillan Cancer Support, approximately 610,000 men in the UK are living with prostate cancer. Additional research indicates that in 2024, only 55% of men in England received a diagnosis before their cancer spread beyond the prostate, when chances of successful treatment and positive outcomes are at their highest.
Anthony Cunliffe, lead medical advisor at Macmillan Cancer Support, commented: “When it comes to prostate cancer, far too many men are still being diagnosed far too late. We need to see better symptom awareness so men seek help earlier and, if we can combine that with speedier diagnosis, we could help revolutionise care for the tens of thousands of men diagnosed with prostate cancer each year in the UK.”
Current NHS guidelines for England permit anyone to request a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test if they are over the age of 50. However, no national screening programme for prostate cancer in the UK currently exists, given that there is no reliable test that can detect the disease requiring treatment at an early stage.
Awareness of the disease among the general public has been on the rise since former Olympian Sir Chris Hoy announced a terminal diagnosis of the disease in 2024.
However, following the release of the UK National Screening Committee’s (NSC) draft recommendation for a targeted prostate cancer screening programme on 28 November 2025, an expert panel advised against prostate cancer screening for most men in the UK. Comprising government health advisers, the panel concluded that a prostate screening programme in the UK would likely cause more harm than good, citing a “high risk” for over-diagnosis versus only a small reduction in the amount of prostate cancer deaths.
The application of AI is having a pronounced impact in the healthcare space, particularly in streamlining imaging workflows to advance diagnostic accuracy and reduce the time practitioners spend on MRI and related imaging protocols. According to a report by GlobalData, the combined AI market across healthcare was valued at $11.9bn in 2024 and is expected to reach a valuation of $57.4bn in 2029.
