Diagnosis of Prostate Cancer, from Conventional Methods Towards the New Promising CTCs

Abstract

Prostate cancer is the second common cancer in men. Unluckily, as the result of the indolence of this cancer in its early stages, timely diagnosis of the disease is very difficult. Hence, in the case of this malignancy, health management and mass monitoring of the population is difficult for health organizations. Because of the incompetence of the conventional diagnostic techniques, many researches are trying to find novel biomarkers in order to develop preventive intervention, screening and targeted therapy. Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) are new biomarkers originating from primary and/or metastatic tumors, and circulate in the bloodstream. Molecular properties of these new biomarkers provide valuable information about the status of the tumor and can be useful in selection of an appropriate therapy. So far lots of methods have been developed for separating CTCs, such as microfluidics technology. Despite of the recent achievements, current methods suffer from several limitations which hinder effective isolation of all subpopulation of CTCs. Thus, finding an ideal method for separating all subsets of CTSs, is still unmet. Herein, conventional diagnostic methods which are used for detection of prostate cancer are introduced and necessities of new diagnostic techniques specially, does based on CTCs are discussed. This review shows that new emerging techniques and promising biomarkers like CTCs could be effectively applied for early detection of prostate cancer and increase the chance of the successful treatment.

Keywords

• Prostate cancer
• Biomarker
• Diagnostic techniques
• Microfluidics technology
• Circulating tumor cells (CTCs)