A new urine test for aggressive prostate cancer combining two different approaches

What is it about?

In this paper we look at combining two different types of measurements taken from different parts of urine, to see if they can help us better detect prostate cancer and determine how agressive it is. Prostate cancer is a disease responsible for a large proportion of all male cancer deaths but there is a high chance that a patient will die with the disease rather than from. Therefore, there is a desperate need for improvements in diagnosing and predicting outcomes for prostate cancer patients to minimise overdiagnosis and overtreatment whilst appropriately treating men with aggressive disease, especially if this can be done without taking an invasive biopsy. In this work we develop a test that predicts whether a patient has prostate cancer and how aggressive the disease is from a urine sample. This model combines the measurement of a protein-marker called EN2 and the levels of 10 genes measured in urine. And proves that integration of information from multiple, non-invasive biomarker sources has the potential to greatly improve how patients with a clinical suspicion of prostate cancer are risk-assessed prior to an invasive biopsy.

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Photo by Timothy Hales Bennett on Unsplash

Photo by Timothy Hales Bennett on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Prostate cancer is a disease responsible for a large proportion of all male cancer deaths but there is a high chance that a patient will die with the disease rather than from. Therefore, there is a desperate need for improvements in diagnosing and predicting outcomes for prostate cancer patients to minimise overdiagnosis and overtreatment whilst appropriately treating men with aggressive disease, especially if this can be done without taking an invasive biopsy.

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