Reliable urinary test for the diagnosis of prostate cancer

ended

Reliable urinary test for the diagnosis of prostate cancer Prostate cancer is a life threatening disease which affects about 400,000 males and causes 92,000 deaths per year in Europe. Among suspected cancer patients who undergo a prostate biopsy, only 45% really have a cancer. However, this diagnostic procedure is associated with discomfort, anxiety, bleeding, and the potential for serious infections requiring hospitalization. It is also very expensive. None of the tests available today offer an alternative which avoids unnecessary biopsies. To solve this problem we propose to validate a urinary, non-invasive, rapid and robust diagnostic test that we call PROSTATOR, for the early detection of prostate cancer without unnecessary biopsies. PROSTATOR quantifies three new prostate cancer specific biomarkers that we identified using our ERC Consolidator Grant. We show that, contrary to the biomarkers quantified by commercialized urinary tests for prostate cancer, our three new biomarkers were detected in all grades of tumours. Only cancer patients detected by our test will have a biopsy to determine the type and the grade of the prostate tumour but unnecessary biopsies will be avoided when the test is negative. Other advantages of our novel test: it can be performed from the first visit to the urologist, collecting the urine after prostatic massage and sending it to a laboratory that will give the diagnosis within 4 days. With this grant, we want to validate our first results on a large number of urines (900). We have established collaborations with Henri-Mondor and Foch hospitals to collect the urines and with the Genomic Platform of Institut Curie to quantify our biomarkers. We started discussions with tech transfer office of the Institut Curie to discuss the opportunity to license PROSTATOR to pharmaceutical companies that already confirmed their interest of our product, or create a start-up.