Unfortunately, prostate cancer is very common. More than 3,500 men in Ireland get prostate cancer every year. The good news is that most have a relatively low-risk form of the disease that will never cause harm. However, prostate cancer is still a big cause of cancer related deaths in men. In Ireland, about 600 men die from prostate cancer every year. Worldwide, it’s approximately 350,000. Therefore, it’s really important that we catch aggressive tumours early while still confined to the prostate gland, before it can spread.
Research in Dr Perry’s lab focuses on developing a simple urine test that could help identify men who need an invasive prostate biopsy to diagnose aggressive prostate cancer. The test called epiCaPture measures changes in the tumour DNA that are easily measured in urine samples. Already, the team have shown that epiCaPture detects 85% of aggressive prostate cancers from a study on 450 men. However, we want to develop a test that detects more than 95% of aggressive prostate cancers, so that men who are epiCaPture-negative are spared unnecessary biopsies and men who are epiCaPture-positive can go for a tissue biopsy to quickly diagnose their disease.
My project aim is to join Dr Perry’s epiCaPture team and work to validate epiCaPture performance. We will do this by working on urine samples that have been kindly provided by patients around Ireland, UK, Netherlands and the USA. I will work on a subset of these (approximately 30) and perform the epiCaPture test from start to finish.