New method for non-invasive prostate cancer screening

Cancer screening is a critical approach for preventing cancer deaths because cases caught early are often more treatable. But while there are already existing ways to screen for different types of cancer, there is a great need for even more safe, cheap and effective methods to save even more lives.

Now a team of researchers led by Shaoxin Li at Guangdong Medical College in China has demonstrated the potential of a new, non-invasive method to screen for prostate cancer, a common type of cancer in men worldwide. They describe their laboratory success testing an existing spectroscopy technique called surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) with a new, sophisticated analysis technique called support vector machine (SVM).

As they described in a new paper in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, they combined SERS and SVM and applied them to blood samples collected from 68 healthy volunteers and 93 people who were clinically confirmed to have prostate cancer. They found their technique could identify the cases of cancer with an accuracy of 98.1 percent.

If the technique proves safe and effective in clinical trials, it may become a new method available to patients and their doctors, helping to improve the early detection and diagnosis of this type of cancer, said Li.

"The results demonstrate that label-free serum SERS analysis combined with SVM diagnostic algorithm has great potential for non-invasive prostate cancer screening," said Li. "Compared to traditional screening methods, this method has the advantages of being non-invasive, highly sensitive and very simple for prostate cancer screening."

A COMMON CAUSE OF CANCER

According to the World Health Organization, prostate cancer is one of the most common types of cancer in men worldwide and a leading cause of cancer-related death. Every year, there are about 899,000 new cases and 260,000 mortalities, comprising 6 percent of all cancer deaths globally. About 1 in every 6 men will develop prostate cancer over their lifetimes.

Finding prostate cancer early

Screening refers to testing to find a disease such as cancer in people who do not have symptoms of that disease. For some types of cancer, screening can help find cancers at an early stage, when they are more easily cured. The goal of screening is to help people live healthier, longer lives.

The goal of screening for prostate cancer is to find it early, in the hope that it can be treated more effectively.

Prostate cancer can often be found early by testing the amount of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in a man's blood. Another way to find prostate cancer early is the digital rectal exam (DRE). For this exam, the doctor puts a gloved finger into the rectum to feel the prostate gland. These 2 tests are described in more detail in the section “What tests can detect prostate cancer?”