Prostate Cancer

Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in men in North America and the second most commonly diagnosed cancer in men worldwide. One in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in his lifetime. Current prostate cancer screening strategies, which combine blood tests for prostate specific antigen (PSA) with digital rectal examinations (DRE), miss a significant fraction of ultimately lethal cancers.

A major goal of the Canary Prostate Program is to develop tools to more accurately discriminate lethal from non-lethal cancers, thus informing critical treatment decisions and sparing many thousands of men from unnecessary radical prostatectomy treatments. Our objective is to develop tests that can:

  1. Identify lethal prostate cancers at an early (curable) stage
  2. Classify prostate cancers as either
  1. potentially lethal: best treated with aggressive therapy,
  2. non-lethal: suitable for continued monitoring without aggressive treatment

We are focusing our initial efforts on collecting the samples needed to identify biomarkers of lethal vs. non-lethal prostate cancer, via a prospective clinical trial called the Prostate Active Surveillance Study (PASS) and a retrospective tissue collection known as the Canary Tissue Microarray (TMA) resource. Canary is also developing molecular imaging techniques, including targeted microbubble and photoacoustic imaging, that will aid in diagnosis and prognosis for prostate cancer.

Apply to conduct studies using PASS biological specimens

Apply to conduct studies using the Canary Tissue Microarray Resource

Progress & Results

  • PASS enrollment is open at 9 clinical sites across the U.S. and in Canada
  • Analyzed the first sample set from PASS participants (urine samples) in collaboration with Gen-Probe in 2011
  • Set up the multi-institutional protocol to build tissue microarrays containing over 1000 samples (analyses ongoing)

→ Meet the Prostate Cancer Research Team
→ Learn more about Prostate Cancer Clinical Studies