EDX Medical Group plc (LON:EDX) Chief Scientific Officer Professor Sir Chris Evans caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss the company’s new workplace health and employee screening service, its competitive advantages, employer demand and the scale of the potential market.
Q1: Chris, today EDX Medical has announced that it’s launching a health and employee screening service. What is it exactly that EDX is providing to employers?
A1: It’s about three parts.
The first part of the service is actually taking place in the premises of the employer so that we distract the employee for the minimum amount of time from their daily work.
To do that, we deploy our team of professional nurses, we have a very, very large team and network around the country, and we’ve done all this stuff before. The nurses, plus our logistical managers from EDX, get in there. They very quickly handle the employee, take the blood, take the saliva samples, use them on our digital physical machine as well, which takes literally a minute – all these things can take seconds or minutes – ask them a few questions, then let them go back to their work, which could be literally 50 yards away or 10 yards away.
So, that’s the first part of the service: doing it in-house for the employer, for the employee, with minimal disruption.
The second part, obviously, is the tests themselves, where we’ve designed these two or three panels of multi-biomarker tests, which we’ve taken quite a number of years to develop and put together, and piece together combinations of important biomarkers covering hundreds of diseases. These are all samples that are shipped to our laboratories, these are all multi-analysed.
The reports are then sent back to the employee, not to the employer. It’s their personal report, which tells them everything’s great, or everything’s pretty good but one or two things don’t look good at all, or something pretty awful is about to happen. So, the report will give immediate recommendations; green, amber, red, to deal with the GP, deal with the clinician etc.
That’s what we’ll actually provide: those three parts of the service to the employer.
Q2: So, what are the benefits of EDX’s offering compared to others in the market?
A2: I think the big difference is that we’ve thought very, very carefully about this and have obviously worked up quite a number of biomarker tests ourselves in our laboratories over the last couple of years. It’s the combination of these different biomarkers in three different panels. We actually have more panels than that, levels 1, 2 and 3 are our main employee panels. The way in which you put these things together gives you the coverage of the different diseases and illnesses that you want to cover.
Having looked at all the competitors over the last several years, I’m very familiar with this space. We are definitely head and shoulders above everybody else.
So, we will cover, with minimal samples from the employee, far more diseases and illness conditions in an employee than anybody else, because we simply have far more biomarkers and we have far more combinations of biomarkers giving particular readouts. These are all computed along with a questionnaire, family history and other things that we do, plus a number of physical parameters that we run through various digital, non-invasive machines. As I said earlier, this is all done in a few minutes, but all of this data is important in terms of generating the output for the employee in their report.
It’s just simply faster, better and more comprehensive than anybody else’s, and, dare I say it, it’s actually cheaper, because we’ve worked out how these things can be done far more cheaply and analysed far more rapidly in large samples.
So, for all those reasons, it is significantly better, and I think that’s been recognised by a number of employers already.
Q3: You mentioned it’s a lot cheaper to produce. Is this what gives you confidence that it will generate in excess of £2 million this financial year?
A3: Yes, we obviously can’t mention numbers at all but there are already a number of employers who have already not just indicated, but have said ‘We’re committed to doing this, and these are the thousands of employees that we would provide you, 2,000, 1,000, 6,000, whatever. Very significant numbers. These are the schedules. These are the timings that we would like you to do in later September, October, November, December etc.’.
So, we are pretty advanced with a number already. They have agreed the price, they’ve picked the level and the costs that they would be prepared to pay per employee, and those numbers exceed £2 million.
Even this morning, one or two very large employers contacted me. The company obviously ended up with me because of the announcement, and I’ll be seeing them shortly. They’re very, very interested.
It’s really about employers who actually really do genuinely care about their employees and those employers, I think, are interested in something that is slick, that is extremely professional and good, fast and cost-effective, because these numbers are of people who need to be tested.
I think we press all those buttons so yes, very confident past the £2 million, we certainly will be, after this morning, significantly past that and so I’m pretty excited. This is good.
Q4: Just how big a potential market is there for this service?
A4: Well, interestingly, there’s no real definitive market saying, the market is exactly £800 million or something per annum but it is very substantial and potentially very substantial.
If you look at just last year, Britain lost, I think it was, 148 million man days of working days in employers’ businesses are lost through absenteeism, ill health, etc., and that equates to a loss of £130 billion last year, in 2025 alone, from the whole economy at large. So, you could say the market is in there somewhere. It’s amongst this £130 billion loss, these 148 million days, and we can make a very significant dent in that.
There’s no way we’re going to turn over £130 billion, I wish we were, but we intend to get around a lot of employers and many, many millions of employees. There are a lot of employees who do get ill, they’re human beings, they get ill and they can’t help it. One of the beauties of all of this, again, is that employees feel really loyal to the companies that look after them, that provide these sorts of testing services and look after their health. The employers obviously benefit because absenteeism decreases and productivity losses decrease as well. So, everybody benefits, everybody is better, and we get paid for that.
We have been asked by a number of employers to stay on the journey with these employees. We don’t just test them once. The ones who are in good nick, we just test them once, they’re done, probably for another year. The ones who are not can have some follow-up things, which we also provide, which I’m not disclosing publicly yet, which we have taken a long time to put together. It’s a very, very specific panel of a lot of tests, which can really pinpoint exactly what is wrong with that employee, what is going on right now and that is very beneficial to the GP, to the clinician and, frankly, to the NHS, because the employer has paid for it. We have generated the data, it’s in the file, and they will know exactly what to go for next and minimise the pain and misery to the employee and minimise the loss to the employer. Actually, it costs the NHS less because we’ve found these things early and caught them early so they can be dealt with early, which is much cheaper.
Q5: Chris, thanks for updating us today. Just before we go, what can investors expect to hear from EDX Medical about this service in the remainder of the year?
A5: Well, interestingly, I think they can hear a lot because we’ll probably update every month or every two months with how it’s going. Why wouldn’t we?
I think I’m very confident we will be winning significant numbers of orders and agreements and contracts.
It’s interesting, I think, obviously, with the sign-off of the employers themselves, to reveal who some of the companies are. A number of them have told me they’re very happy to be revealed publicly that they are prepared to spend significant sums doing this to look after their employees. They’re all different types of businesses, and the diversity of these businesses right across the UK is actually quite fascinating: who is prepared to do what for their employees.
So we will be updating the market. Obviously, the markets are always interested in earnings and revenues coming from these sorts of projects and we spend a lot of time developing them, getting them fully approved, regulated, packaged and ready to go with our professional logistical team.
We will be frequently updating the market on the progress of this whole service in the UK this year.
