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For Patients

About Prostate Cancer Diagnosis and Prognosis

Prostate cancer is one of the most prevalent cancers in men worldwide.  Millions of men are diagnosed with prostate cancer and many of them died of it. 

Prostate cancer is also a slow-growing cancer.  For many men, the cancer is low-risk and remains indolent so they do not need treatment and only requires “watchful wait”.  However, some men with prostate cancer that is high-risk and aggressive would need immediate treatment.  Some men received prostatectomy or other treatments are “cured” of the disease, yet others’ cancer will come back and become metastatic and lethal. 

Therefore it is not only important to detect and diagnose prostate cancer before the cancer becomes lethal and kill the patients, but also very important to tell if the cancer is high or low-risk, if the cancer has or will metastasize, if the cancer will recur, and if the patient can survive for long time. 

Current Prostate Cancer Diagnostic and Prognostic Methods

To make correct diagnosis of prostate cancer and give good guidance to clinical treatment, we need accurate prostate cancer diagnostic and prognostic tests.  However, currently no ideal and accurate prostate cancer diagnostic or prognostic test is available.  No clinical or pathological parameter, no biomarker or panel of biomarkers has sufficiently high sensitivity and specificity that is able to give accurate cancer diagnosis or provide accurate and actionable clinical guidance to cancer treatment. 

As a result of low sensitivity of current cancer diagnostic tests, many prostate cancer patients were not detected by current diagnostic methods, therefore missed the opportunity to be treated early, which led to patient death and prostate cancer as the second leading cause of cancer-related death.  On the other hand, many men without cancer had to endure invasive and repetitive biopsies due to the low specificity of the current testing methods.  Without accurate prognostic test, many low-risk and indolent prostate cancer patients had to endure unnecessary treatment including prostatectomy, radiation therapy and chemotherapy, while patients with high-risk and aggressive prostate cancer did not receive sufficient treatment which result in cancer recurrence, progression, metastasis and patient death. 

Our Solutions for Patient Needs

Because of patients’ urgent need for more accurate prostate cancer diagnostic and prognostic tests, we set out to identify and develop novel and more accurate methods to address problems of existing tests. 

After years of research and clinical development, we have successfully created four products that have much higher sensitivity and specificity than existing tests for prostate cancer diagnosis and prognosis.  They are able to distinguish prostate cancer from normal or benign prostate lesion, to distinguish high-risk and aggressive prostate cancer that requires immediate treatment from low-risk and indolent prostate cancer that needs only surveillance, to distinguish patients with metastatic cancer or will develop metastatic cancer from patients without metastatic cancer, to distinguish patients who will have cancer recurrence from patients who will not, and predict patient survival time. 

These tests will be used for cancer detection, patient stratification, treatment guidance, and cancer progression and recurrence monitoring.  By using accurate diagnosis and prognosis, current problems of “false-negative” and “false-positive” in prostate cancer diagnosis, and “under-treatment” and “over-treatment” in clinical practice can be resolved, thus will significantly reduce cancer recurrence, metastasis and patient death.  Ultimately this will greatly help patients by improving cancer treatment outcome, avoiding unnecessary patient suffering and lowering healthcare cost, and releasing burden to patient families and the society.