(NC)-Prostate cancer is far easier to diagnose today than it used to be, thanks to a simple blood test, the protein-specific antigen (PSA) test. The problem is, it’s too easy. The PSA test is so sensitive, it can pick up even the slightest hint of cancerous cells, many of which may never develop into clinically significant cancer - the kind that endangers lives.

“We’ve become very good at finding cancer. The problem is, we don’t know who’s going to need intervention,” says Marianne Sadar.

Dr. Sadar, from the University of British Columbia, says some men may be receiving surgery or radiation therapy when they don’t need treatment, and that these treatments can have unpleasant side effects, such as incontinence or impotence. She is receiving support from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to develop a way to tell which cancer cells will go on to develop into an aggressive form of prostate cancer - and which will lie there, essentially dormant, for the remainder of a man’s life.

She and her colleagues have found some novel sequences (genes) associated with an aggressive form of prostate cancer in a laboratory model. They are testing whether the presence of these sequences in a man’s prostate cancer can predict how aggressive his disease will be.

As a first step, they are looking at clinical samples of prostate cancer to see if there is a link between these sequences and men whose prostate cancer turned out to be an aggressive recurrent form of the disease. If so, they can then look for the sequences in men whose PSA test comes back positive to help determine who needs intervention. They then want to develop a non-invasive blood or urine test that can be easily applied.

“That’s our dream,” she says. “We want to be able to pick out those men who will develop clinically significant disease. Because right now, we have to treat everyone.”

Credit: www.newscanada.com

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