New Imaging Agent May Improve Prostate Cancer Diagnosis

More than 220,000 American men are diagnosed with prostate cancer each and every year. While many of those men will find their cancer is slow-growing and requires little or no immediate treatment, some men’s lives will hinge on action being taken. Properly evaluating the risk involved, however, has been somewhat problematic in the past. A new imaging agent created by ImaginAb, however, may soon pave the way for quicker, more accurate results. The company’s agent has proven itself superior to others in not only detecting the disease through imaging in general, but also in accurately finding metastatic cells in normal-sized lymph nodes.

While still in the trial phase, the new agent is showing a great deal of promise. This type of breakthrough is seen as critical by many for a few important reasons. They include:

• Increasing overall diagnostic accuracy – Diagnosing prostate cancer is problematic at best. While blood tests exist, they do tend to present with false positives, making men undergo invasive biopsies that aren’t always needed.
• Assisting with bypassing that invasive step at first – While biopsies play a vital role in helping diagnose and stage prostate cancer, a reliable imaging technique may help eliminate those men who are false positives from undergoing this more invasive procedure to rule out cancer in their cases.
• Ensuring early detection of more aggressive forms of cancer – Identifying aggressive forms of the disease as they develop or begin to spread is key to saving lives. If an imaging test proves capable of doing this, men who need more immediate intervention may find it provided much, much sooner as a result.

Prostate cancer claims an estimated 27,500 lives each year in the United States. Having better tools for identifying more aggressive forms of the disease could help loser these numbers.

The new imaging agent remains under clinical evaluation. How soon it might be made available to the general public remains unclear.

About Author:-Choice Cancer Care is an independent, physician-owned cancer center network. Dr. Gregory Echt, a radiation oncologist with over two decades of experience, is the founder of Choice Cancer Care. Choice Cancer Care is among the busiest practices in the country for brachytherapy, or prostate seed implant therapy – a cancer treatment plan for prostate cancer that provides remarkable success rates and fewer life-limiting side effects.