Kansas City, Kan. ? Kathleen Sebelius lost an aunt to breast cancer and Robert Hemenway stared down prostate cancer.

Both top executives – Sebelius of the state of Kansas, Hemenway of Kansas University – shared a podium Tuesday to welcome, encourage and embrace the promise of a British company whose core technology for detecting cancer in blood tests could one day speed the diagnoses of breast cancer in women by as much as four years.

And the company, OncImmune Ltd., will be running its North American headquarters out of a 14,000-square-foot lab in Lenexa, one set to have at least 120 employees, at least $30 million in investment and the potential for lifting hopes for people at risk for cancer.

The company’s research partner: KU, which will add 20 employees, accept $500,000 in research work and endeavor to help expand the company’s testing to other forms of tumerous cancer.

“Early detection, we know, saves lives – breast cancer lives, prostate cancer lives, lung cancer lives – (and) there’s no question that OncImmune’s innovative approach to making this detection even earlier will mean the difference between life and death,” said Sebelius, leading the official party to welcome the company to Kansas during a ceremony Tuesday morning at the KU Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan. “What we’re talking about here is saving more lives.”

Geoffrey Hamilton-Fairley, the company’s chairman, said that OncImmune was drawn to Kansas because of the world-class scientists at KU, a high-quality commercial laboratory – IBT – in Lenexa, and the work of economic-development officials, government leaders and incentives offered by the Kansas Bioscience Authority.

The authority is giving the company $500,000 to spend on research at KU, plus another $2 million – to be matched by $2 million from the company – to equip OncImmune’s new lab with advanced robotics and other equipment, plus other resources to speed their blood tests to market, scheduled by the end of 2007.

The authority’s investment was a key difference-maker in comparing the Kansas City area with other communities, Hamilton-Fairley said.

Other communities that had been vying for OncImmune’s North American operations included Chicago, St. Louis, Atlanta, Phoenix and Madison, Wis., said Lynn Parman, vice president for life sciences and technology at the Kansas City Area Development Council. Parman worked previously in Lawrence as vice president for economic development at the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce.

OncImmune is a spin-off from research at Nottingham University in England, the school that was home to Sir Peter Mansfield’s work for applying magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology for medical diagnoses. Mansfield won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2003.

OncImmune’s tests measure autoantibodies that accumulate in blood in reaction to the presence of a cancerous tumor.

The appearance of such antibodies signals the presence of a tumor, even at its earliest stages. Tests show that breast cancer can be detected four years earlier than a mammogram might indicate.

Then it’s a matter of locating each tumor, through subsequent examinations, before initiating treatment.

“You can’t see it, it’s so small,” Hamilton-Fairley said, after the announcement. “That’s part of the problem. You have to keep looking for it.”