Alberta men diagnosed with prostate cancer could soon have a better blood test to help determine if they can bypass a painful and invasive biopsy.

The Alberta Prostate Cancer Research initiative claims its new blood test is 40 per cent more accurate at identifying men with aggressive forms of prostate cancer than the common prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test, which researchers say often leads to unneeded biopsies.

We know what we will really want in patients is to detect which patients are going to have metastatic cancer down the road because we need to cure them now, said Dr. John Lewis, a University of Alberta oncology researcher who helped develop the new test.

What were hoping is that if this test says they have aggressive cancer, they go ahead and get a biopsy to confirm. If it says they dont have aggressive cancer, they can potentially skip the biopsy altogether.

Lewis expects the new test to cost several hundred dollars. Compared with a biopsy that costs almost $2,000 and involves pressing 12 needles through the prostate, Lewis believes the blood test has the potential to provide significant savings to the health-care system and prevent side-effects from operations on men unlikely to develop aggressive cancer.

A patient who gets the new test, called the Extracellular Vesicle Fingerprint Predictive Score test, will have it done alongside the traditional PSA test.

The research team has been working for five years, studying the spread of prostate cancer. The new test takes advantage of advances in nanotechnology and machine learning to test for tiny fragments of prostate cancer in the bloodstream and recognize aggressive forms of cancer. The blood test was studied on 377 Alberta men who were suspected to have prostate cancer.

Lewis said there are plans to do more research, but hes confident this is the test theyll be taking to market. It will be sold though a university spin-off company called Nanostics Inc., founded by Lewis and three of his colleagues.

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U of A uses nanotechnology to develop new test for aggressive prostate cancer - National Post