New prostate cancer tests

Less Grey Imaging

I'm signed up to Prostate Cancer Research and they produce a great magazine with the latest research often funded by donations to them. At the moment the PSA remains the best test despite it's unreliability, however a couple of things stood out in the recent issue:

'Less Grey Imaging'; as we know the PSA test is not reliable. MRI misses 20% of cancers and a whopping six in ten men undergo unnecessary procedures. This new technology offers us up to a 20-fold increase in resolution compared to mpMRI, which provides a grey, difficult-to-read image.

It works by injecting a commonly used contrast agent into a vein that contains millions of tiny and harmless microbubbles that travel through the patient’s bloodstream to the prostate. Super resolution ultrasound imaging is then used to track these microbubbles as they flow inside the prostate. Due to the altered blood flow in cancerous tissue, the image highlights previously unseen tumours, enabling earlier diagnosis. 94% of tumours are correctly identified and the technology is cheaper, faster and less claustrophobic than  an MRI scan. It is now going to a Phase II trial to take it forward. It cannot come soon enough! 

See more including a short video re Less Grey Imaging here. You can support research into this here.

New 'Spit test'; earlier this year researchers from The Institute of Cancer Research in London made headlines by announcing that their at-home spit test could spot which men are most at risk of prostate cancer. The test doesn't look for signs of prostate cancer in the body but rather looks at changes to a man's DNA that increase risks of prostate cancer.  The test is not commercially available yet but is now going to a large £42m trial to see if this genetic approach works at scale.

PSE test: a couple of years ago the University of East Anglia announced their PSE test was 92% accurate at detecting the disease. The test is a combination of the existing PSA blood test and another blood test they developed in collaboration with Oxford Biodynamics, called the EpiSwitch test. This looks at how DNA is folded in specific immune cells which might provide tell-tale signs of prostate cancer developing in the body. The combination, which they called the Prostate Screening EpiSwitch test (PSE test). It correctly identified men who didn't have prostate cancer 94% of the time.

Urine test; another recent development is a new urine test that measures 18 genes associated with prostate cancer. It provides higher accuracy for detecting clinically significant cancers than PSA and other existing biomarker tests, according to a study published last year in JAMA Oncology.  This means less unnecessary invasive biopsies.

There are various other tests being developed including one using AI to look at 100 biological markers in blood and urine samples, but as Prostate Cancer UK caution “many of these tests are still very early in their development and require robust testing”.