A Urine Test for Prostate Cancer?
Oncologists who treat prostate cancer have long been frustrated by a quagmire: They know they treat many men whose disease won’t harm them, but at the same time they fail to catch aggressive cases that kill. There’s no good way to separate the two right now, but in tomorrow’s issue ofNature, a team at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, suggests a new strategy: Look for specific chemicals in urine that could distinguish among patients with no sign of disease, disease that isn’t critical to treat, and disease that’s most dangerous.
Researchers have poured tremendous energy into early cancer detection and forecasting a cancer’s path. Hundreds of studies have been published on the use of gene expression or protein analysis, but few tests have reached the clinic. Even those that have, such as an early-detection test for ovarian cancer called OvaSure, which picks up protein patterns, have been criticized for not being adequately tested. In prostate cancer, which kills nearly 30,000 men in the United States each year, “there’s been a lot of screening, and people still die,” says Ian Thompson, a urologic oncologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. The community is “desperate,” he says, for ways to identify life-threatening tumors.