As is commonly known in the biomedical community, predicting how prostate cancer will progress has been much like flipping a coin. But a new discovery could change that by enhancing the prediction accuracy.

Investigators analyzed the genetic data in the cells of nearly 300 prostate cancer samples and found certain fragment mismatches called “fusions” in the patients who had recurrent cancer despite removal of the prostate.

Normally, Genomic DNA is lined up in the cells in a very organized fashion, but in cancer cells, it appears the DNA gets mixed up where a piece of one gene is attached to the piece of another gene. The fusions result in the genes unable to make proteins to suppress tumor growth, and the cancer grows more vigorously.

There is about 90% chance to be a recurrence of prostate cancer if one have fusions. So clinicians can give correct judges based on this high number, thereby providing effective therapeutic regimens, such as removal of the prostate and hormone therapy.

A researcher said, “We’re in the process of validating this in a larger set of patients, though I expect one day there will be a test you can order, And tests like this may be helpful in deciding is it safe for us to do active surveillance or not in your case.”

Reference:

 Supervised Multi-View Canonical Correlation Analysis (sMVCCA): Integrating histologic and proteomic features for predicting recurrent prostate cancer. IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2014 Sep 5.