Blood Biomarker Assay Detects Prostate Cancer Early

Approximately 14% of men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point during their lifetime and nearly three million men are estimated to be living with prostate cancer in the USA alone.

While more than 80% of all prostate cancers are detected at the local stage, and nearly 100% of men diagnosed and treated at this stage will be disease-free after five years, a small percentage of men experience more rapidly growing, aggressive forms of prostate cancer.


Scientists at the University of Surrey (Guildford, UK) collaborated with a commercial company to carry out a retrospective study on blood samples collected from 537 men, including 266 with prostate cancer and 271 age-matched healthy controls. The most common blood test currently used to detect prostate cancer, the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA), is reported to detect 53% of prostate cancers at 73% specificity.

The PSA test is commonly used for patient monitoring and other purposes because it is a low-cost, non-invasive test that is easy to use for the patient. The PSA test requires a small amount of blood and uses a common screening platform, known as an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), that is ubiquitous in healthcare laboratories worldwide. However, sensitivity and specificity of the PSA test remains less than optimal.

The samples in the study were analyzed with a single NuQ biomarker assay (VolitionRx Limited, Namur, Belgium) which detected 71% of early stage I prostate cancer cases and 86% of late stage IV prostate cancer at 93% specificity (7% false negatives). Hardev Pandha, MB ChB, PhD, Director of the Surrey Cancer Research Institute and Professor of Urological Oncology, said, “This NuQ biomarker study has shown very encouraging results in this patient cohort. Further studies are needed but the test may potentially have uses in detecting and monitoring men with prostate cancer.”

Jake Micallef, PhD, MBA, Chief Scientific Officer at VolitionRx, said, “This single NuQ biomarker assay has shown great potential for high accuracy in detecting early stage I prostate cancer. The ability to detect early stage prostate cancer at significantly greater sensitivity than the PSA test with a simple ELISA blood test is a remarkable breakthrough. The accuracy of this single NuQ test may be further improved by use of a combination of NuQ tests in a panel with PSA and this, plus the usefulness of the test for monitoring treatment, will be a focus of future studies by our team. The achievement of high accuracy with a single assay, rather than a panel of assays, is the result of the increasing insight of VolitionRx in predicting and identifying NuQ markers for the detection of specific cancers with high sensitivity and with very few false positives.” The study was presented the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting, held April 16-20, 2016, in New Orleans (LA, USA).

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