[3] Fitzgerald's postdoctoral work took place at the Department of Adult and Paediatric Gastroenterology at St Bartholomew's Hospital and at The Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry, where she was supervised by Michael Farthing and funded by an MRC Clinical Scientist award.
[3] After her postdoctoral positions, Fitzgerald began her own research group at the MRC Cancer Unit in Cambridge in 2001, under the mentorship of Bruce Ponder and Ron Laskey.
[citation needed] In 2004, Fitzgerald and her group developed Cytosponge, a novel screening test for Barrett's oesophagus, a common precursor to the often deadly cancer oesophageal adenocarcinoma.
[9] Cytosponge has been praised for its minimally invasive, economical design compared to the current standard for identifying Barrett's oesophagus, the endoscopy.
[6] The results of the BEST3 trial were published in The Lancet in summer 2020 showing that the Cytosponge-TFF3 test can identify ten times more people with Barrett's oesophagus than current GP care.
A fourth major clinical trial BEST4 will enrol 120,000 patients to determine whether this test could reduce morbidity and mortality from oesophageal cancer is rolled out as a pro-active, population based screening programme.
[citation needed] Fitzgerald is leading a trial in collaboration with Owlstone Medical that will be testing the company's Breath Biopsy technology for detecting cancer.
This pilot study will capture and examine the volatile molecules found in breath in the hopes of identifying signatures of metabolites from cancer cells.