Kearney Urology Center in the US has reported a 50% reduction in biopsies since adopting a new prostate cancer blood test with “unprecedented accuracy”.
The test, EpiSwitch PSE, is the culmination of a ten-year British collaboration between Imperial College, Imperial NHS Trust, University of East Anglia and Oxford Biodynamics.
There is currently no national screening programme for prostate cancer in the UK, where around 55,100 new cases are diagnosed every year.
At-risk men with signs of prostate cancer may be offered a PSA test as the first method of diagnosis. However, this can miss some cancers and is associated with a very high number of false positives, causing patients who do not have the disease to undergo unnecessary biopsies and interventions.
The minimally-invasive EpiSwitch combines the PSA test with a DNA test and has been shown to reduce the false positive rate of the PSA test from three in four to less than one in ten.
Garrett Pohlman, urologist at Kearney Urology Center, said: “I cannot imagine running my practice without EpiSwitch PSE; it’s a game changer… Since adopting this test, I have cut the number of biopsies in half, allowing men who have tested negative for prostate cancer to avoid the pain and potential side effects of an unnecessary intervention.”
Mathias Winkler, consultant urologist and surgeon, Charing Cross Hospital and Imperial College London, described EpiSwitch as a “diagnostic prostate cancer test with unprecedented accuracy”.
The new test is currently only available privately in the UK, while it is reimbursed by several insurers in the US, including Medicare.
“There is much value in this test, as recognised by clinical and private health-care institutions in both the US and UK today,” said Alexandre Akoulitchev, chief scientific officer, Oxford BioDynamics. “Extending access to the general public in the UK would be subject to the NHS and National Screening Committee.”
The announcement comes just one month after researchers from the Institute of Cancer Research found a way to predict how long prostate cancer patients will respond to the PARP inhibitor olaparib, paving the way for the development of new drugs that prevent resistance.