Background: Detecting prostate cancer is, quite literally, a pain in the ass. Under the current paradigm the disease is confirmed through a combination of lab work and invasive diagnostics. This involves a painful biopsy procedure where surgeons remove a tissue sample from the prostate gland itself. Unfortunately a large number of patients who endure this procedure don’t actually need it. These otherwise healthy people risk hospital infection, surgical death, and lingering side-effects including discomfort, pain, and internal bleeding. How it works: The KIST team decided to focus on urine because it contains trace amounts of what researchers refer to as “cancer factors.” Typically, humans can’t diagnose prostate cancer using urine because the concentration of these cancer factors is simply not high enough to withstand the standard testing methods. [Read: How Netflix shapes mainstream culture, explained by data] To overcome this obstacle, the team used a special semiconductor-based sensor sensitive enough to detect enough data for the team’s algorithms to parse and correlate. Per a press release from the Korean National Council of Science and Technology: Quick take: Wow! This is awesome. Assuming everything in the research pans out when scaled to the general population, this could save a lot of lives. On average about 1 in every 41 men will die of prostate cancer, it’s the second leading cause of cancer-related death among men worldwide. Best of all, the team believes this work can be adapted for other types of cancer. You can read the team’s research paper here.
