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Essay / Discovery of a biomarker for prostate cancer - 673
Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in men worldwide after lung cancer (WCRF International), and in Australia , it accounts for 30% of all new cancers in men and 13.4% of all cancer deaths in men (Cancer Australia). Currently, prostate-specific antigen (PSA) is the most commonly used serum biomarker for prostate cancer and most commonly used by urologists. However, PSA-based screening has been shown to have a high rate of false positives and false negatives with low specificity, and it is not capable of well distinguishing between cancer and benign hyperplasia of prostate or between indolent and aggressive cancers, thus leading to overtreatment, especially unnecessary biopsies. (Otero) (Qian). Therefore, there is an urgent need for a new specific biomarker for the early detection of prostate cancer, and effective biomarkers will be able to reduce mortality rates and appropriate clinical interventions can be applied. Different approaches have been tested to discover new biomarkers for detection. of prostate cancer, and there has been success in this area with specific markers found such as PCA3 (FDA approved) and the TMPRSS2:ERG fusion gene which have synergistic sensitivity when the two are tested in combination for prostate cancer (Otero) (Dijkstra). In the field of prostate cancer research, the drug Docetaxel is effectively used in the treatment of advanced prostate cancer known as castration-refractory prostate cancer (CRPC). However, patients eventually develop resistance, and the search for a biomarker of disease and drug resistance in prostate cancer is in demand (O'neill) (O'connell). Mass spectrometry (MS) analysis of parental, docetaxel-resistant drug-resistant prostate cancer cell lines revealed that...... middle of article ...... there are potential in proteins that have been identified to act as prostate cancer biomarkers. In summary, future research in the area of biomarker discovery needs to be validated with respect to the use of cell lines as a model and the proteomic techniques used. For example, having a non-malignant control in addition to cancer cell lines is essential because, although the cell lines represent the tumors from which they originated (Sardana), the candidate markers discovered might not be commonly expressed in other Prostate cancer cells nor have the ability to distinguish between cancer and non-malignant cells (Johnson) (Hosseini-Beheshti). The discovery of novel prostate cancer-specific biomarkers has the potential to improve diagnostic accuracy and efficiency and reduce mortality (Soliman), and should therefore be pursued to validate current limitations..