Infrared Imaging for Diagnosis and Prediction of the Biopotental of Low and Intermediate Risk Prostate Cancer

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More than a quarter of a million people are diagnosed with cancer annually in the UK and the four most common ones, breast, lung, bowel and prostate cancer, make up over half of all these cases. Many, such as prostate cancer correlate strongly with age, 77% of cases being diagnosed in men over the age of 55. This produces a compound problem, as Western populations are ageing rapidly and the number of people diagnosed with cancer in European countries is inevitably going to rise. This will put a considerable strain on all parts of the health care systems and will have dramatic effects on health care costs. The problem is particularly prescient in certain cancers such as prostate cancer and breast cancer, which are endemic in the older population and whose natural history is uncertain in many cases. There is a clear clinical need for a robust and preferably automated system which can not only facilitate the pathological diagnosis but also to discriminate between tumours of low risk, which require surveillance or less aggressive treatment, and those of high risk, which will progress more rapidly and which need aggressive intervention to prevent morbidity and death. We have shown previously in small scale studies that infra red spectral markers used in conjunction with algorithmic models can be utilised not only to provide tumour grading data but also to provide staging and prognostic information. The attraction of infrared spectroscopy to aid clinical diagnosis is that it is a widely known technology which is readily available, reliable, simple to use and relatively inexpensive. It also allows further post scanning interrogation because it does not destroy the tissue under investigation. However, introduction into the clinical environment has been hampered by a lack of understanding of some of the fundamental principles. We have successfully addressed many of the fundamental issue with single cells and aim to utilize this knowledge to address scanning of tissue biopsiesThe aim of this proposal is to develop techniques using spectroscopic analysis of cancer tissue, which build on a strong scientific base developed by our collaborative research group and by others working in this field. We propose to develop rapid and accurate systems of analysis, which can be applied to the identification and characterisation of biological tissues and we will use prostate cancer as the primary model.Using prostate cancer as our model of low and high risk disease we will adapt existing technologies and protocols to enable rapid high throughput infra red screening of tissue samples which could be transferred from the research laboratory into a standard pathology laboratory. We will then use this system to develop a model, which can distinguish between low and high risk prostate cancers in samples that have been previously graded as low or intermediate grade prostate cancers and of known outcome. This model will then be blind tested using a large set of low and intermediate grade prostate cancers to assess the ability of the model to predict disease outcome. An added benefit of spectral screening is that interrogation of the spectral differences between high and low risk disease will direct research towards novel molecular markers that may shed light on tumour progression as well as generating new molecular diagnostic markers for use in the clinic. As the technique is non destructive any new markers identified can be tested back on the original tissue it was discovered from.We envision that development and robust testing of the system will lead to a powerful diagnostic and prognostic tool that may be incorporated in to oncological practice both in the laboratory and the clinic and that it will potentially describe new techniques with utility in other areas of bio-health and biological science.