How reliable and useful are angiogenesis blood mediators for prostate cancer diagnosis?

To evaluate if a blood panel of genes involved in the modulation of the immune system, angiogenesis and tumor development could be used for prostate cancer detection.

Gene expression profiling of blood samples was assessed with the human angiogenesis RT² Profiler™ pcr array. The study group was divided into training and a testing/validation set. In total, 36 blood samples from 6 heatlhy men, 19 patients with prostate cancer (PCa) and 11 patients with benign prostate pathology (BP) were included in this study.

Transcriptional analysis revealed a supervised signature of 28 genes which discriminated the PCa samples from control on the training set (fold regulation [FR] cut off 1.5, p<0.05). This signature was further validated on the testing set. All 28 genes used for this classification were differentially expressed in the new set of 12 PCa samples compared to control but also compared to benign samples (FR cut off 1.5, p<0.05).

Our data could provide new insight into PCa, as a non-invasive predictive tool which along with other factors could improve PCa diagnosis. However, our findings have to be confirmed in a larger cohort of patients before having a clear picture of how this molecular profile will help to increase the accuracy of diagnosis.