Innovative Diagnostic Methods to Detect Prostate Cancer in its Early Stages

Prostate cancer is an asymptomatic and slow-growing tumor that is usually detected at the age of 40-50 years. But though it is discovered at that age, prostate cancer starts occurring in young men. The fields of oncology and urology are advancing fast including new treatment options, enrolling clinical trials, screening, and recommendations alongside updated guidelines. Researchers are working on developing innovative tools that can detect prostate cancer in its early stages when it is most curable. Recently, innovative diagnostic methods based on urine analysis have been developed to help in detection of prostate cancer.

According to the adopted methods,

• There was the possibility of identifying cancer-characteristic urine odor fingerprint from biological samples using senso-instrumental analyses,
• Through a chemical characterization of liquid urine or its gaseous headspace with the aim of identifying potential prostate cancer-specific biomarkers.
• The two approaches propose the comparative analysis of urine samples from prostate cancer patients and healthy men with the aim of discriminating the two classes. In recent research, it was demonstrated that a trained canine olfactory system could identify prostate cancer-specific volatile organic compounds in samples of urine with high specificity and sensitivity of nearly 98%.
• The approach might have the potential to provide a non-invasive alternative to prostate biopsy and PSA sampling for detecting prostate cancer. The results suggested that prostate cancer-specific volatile organic compounds might depend on the tumor’s metabolic process.

Because of the limits of adopting trained dogs in the clinical setting, researchers focused on investigating the possibility of transferring the experimental observations to an instrumental method based on analyzing urine samples through electronic noses.

In past decades, genomic and proteomic technologies have been used as strategies to identify biomarkers for detecting, prognosis and predicting and improving the understanding prostate.

The ambitious purpose has seen a multidisciplinary collaborative team of biologists, clinicians, ethologists, engineering, physicians and biochemical scientists come together to understand the complexity of human beings. In this way, they can clarify concepts and come up with alternative experiments to develop appropriate methods of diagnostic of prostate cancer.

About Author

Dr. Echt and his team at the Prostate Seed Institute offer the most highly sophisticated methods of radiation therapy available in the United States, equal to that found in major medical center and academic settings. These include prostate seed implantation, high dose radiation implants, and external beam radiation with image-guided and intensity-modulated (IGRT and IMRT) capabilities.

Dr. Echt and his team at the Prostate Seed Institute offer the most highly sophisticated methods of radiation therapy available in the United States, equal to that found in major medical center and academic settings. These include prostate seed impla