Along with significant advances in prostate cancer biology research, we also observe the rapid development of modern diagnostic tests. New biomarkers are derived to detect disease while it is organ-confined to stratify the risk and to aid clinical decision-making. Majority of these tools have already been validated clinically, but only a few have received premarket clearance and administration approval. Superiority of novel tests is visible not only in improved detection accuracy but predominantly in the assessment of tumour aggressiveness and selection of patients eligible for conservative management. Two factors limiting the clinical implementation of validated biomarker candidates are costs and local availability. For these reasons, currently, their true clinical role starts after routine screening with prostate-specific antigen test. With this review of prostate cancer biomarkers, we attempted to draw general conclusions on clinical perspectives of these novel tools.
Urologia internationalis. 2017 Sep 15 [Epub ahead of print]
Piotr Zapała, Bartosz Dybowski, Sławomir Poletajew, Piotr Radziszewski
Department of General, Oncological and Functional Urology, Medical University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.