In fluorescence molecular endoscopy (FME), patients are administered fluorescent dyes (fluorophores) that specifically bind to diseased tissue and are activated by excitation light. This causes the diseased tissue to glow on the monitor in the treatment room. This enables surgeons to remove even the smallest lesions, i.e. tumor tissue in the early stages, because it stands out clearly from healthy tissue. We innovate FME technologies to revolutionize the early detection, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. In the ESCEND project (https://www.escend.eu/), patients were administered a fluorescent dye that specifically binds to cancerous tissue by spraying it into the esophagus. This enabled doctors to discover lesions that were not visible with conventional inspection using white light endoscopy. Within ESCEND we advanced the evidence on minimally invasive FME, which is on the verge of clinical translation and with immense clinical impact and commercialization potential. We showed that FME can detect disease earlier, with higher specificity and sensitivity, and stratify disease in terms of cancer progression over the current state of the art. With a sensitivity and positive predictive value of 98.6% and 88.8%, respectively, ESCEND further highlighted that the “red flag” operation of FME can lead to reduced biopsies during surveillance, compared to the standard Seattle protocol. Moreover, ESCEND showed that FME can identify 115% more lesions compared to the general endoscopist, and 26% more lesions compared to a Barrett expert. These astonishing results define the socioeconomic impact of ESCEND, which can be translated to ~21,000 lives saved and >€2.9 Billion saved for new cases of esophageal cancer diagnosed every year by switching from treating metastasized disease (€150,000 average cost) to curative endoscopic mucosal resection (EMR) (<€10,000) in Europe alone. Importantly, ESCEND and its results fully comply with the frameworks identified within the Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan and the US Healthy People 2030 initiatives, even though our project precedes the publication of those two initiatives in 2021 and 2020 correspondingly. Currently we are planning the Phase III clinical trial to statistically confirm the findings of ESCEND on a much larger population of patients and, thus, achieve the ambition that a hybrid white-light and fluorescence endoscope will become the new BE diagnostic standard in the near future. In another application we further advance the FME technology and apply it to inflammatory bowel disease. Millions of people suffer from inflammatory bowel disease that makes their lives difficult. To this day, it is not known whether the expensive drugs reach the inflammation and whether the dose is sufficient for the patient. In the msGUIDE project (https://msguide.munichimaging.eu/), we are developing a novel endoscope and drugs with fluorescent dyes that will enable us to quantify drug distribution and concentration in the intestine and identify individual drug target cells.