Urinary biomarkers in prostate cancer: An update

Widespread screening for prostate cancer has led to an increased incidence, an improved disease specific survival, but also to overdiagnosis and overtreatment. The limitations of screening tools, especially PSA, have led to active investigation of new biomarkers in recent years. Urinary markers, suitable for large scale use, minimally invasive collected, arouse of particular interest. Numerous protein, DNA or RNA markers are explored in order to improve detection and prognostic evaluation of prostate cancer. Some of them have already shown clinical values. PCA3 provided particularly encouraging results for the specific population of patients having a first set of negative biopsy, for which using PCA3 assay could allow to avoid unnecessary repeated biopsy. Fusion genes showed promising abilities in prostate cancer detection. New research methods are also emerging, and high-throughput technologies will facilitate high-dimensional biomarker discovery. Future approaches will probably integrate proteomic, transcriptomic and multiplex approaches to identify combinations of multiple biomarkers to optimize the detection of prostate cancer. In the near future, these markers would probably be able to provide prognostic data to discriminate significant cancers, a major challenge for prostate cancer treatment. (c) 2010 Published by Elsevier Masson SAS.