A new blood test for prostate cancer that promises to be much more accurate than the existing one is being developed by British scientists.
The new test could also pick up prostate cancer earlier, leading to improved survival rates.
Currently the most effective blood test for prostate cancer is the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test.
However, this is less than 50 per cent accurate, meaning that it gives lots of indications for prostate cancer where the condition does not actually exist.
Prostate cancer
As a result many men are sent for a biopsy to check for cancer which is not there, while some even undergo radiotherapy.
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in Britain, killing 10,000 a year.
But now researchers at Oxford Gene Technology (OGT) have identified a set of biological markers that appears to distinguish prostate cancer from benign prostate disease and health tissue with 90 per cent accuracy.
These protein ‘biomarkers’ betray the existence of antibodies which are automatically raised in response to the development of prostate cancer.
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A new study has found that variations in a gene for an enzyme involved in cell energy metabolism is likely to increase the risk for prostate cancer.
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health found that the genetic variations impair the enzyme phosphodiesterase 11A (PDE11A), which helps regulate cell’s responses to hormones and other signals.
Previous studies by NIH researchers have linked genetic variations that inactivate PDE11A with increased susceptibility to testicular cancer and adrenal tumours.
The researchers found that a group of men with prostate cancer were nearly four times more likely to have variations affecting the activity of PDE11A than did men who did not have prostate cancer.
“Our study indicates that PDE11A one day may have a place in genetic screening for predisposition to prostate cancer,” said senior author of the study, Constantine Stratakis.
The researchers examined tissue from 50 men with prostate cancer and 287 men who did not have prostate cancer.
The researchers analysed the DNA of the men and found 8 variations in the PDE11A gene that decreased the production or activity of PDE11A.
If the men with prostate cancer, 30 percent had one or more of these variations, compared with 10 percent of the men who did not have prostate cancer.
Of the variations the researchers detected, 5 had been detected in previous studies and 3 were previously unknown.
The findings were published online in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.