Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Identification of potentially aggressive prostate cancer at the time of diagnosis is challenging due to the diagnostic inaccuracy associated with biopsy. There is a lack of reliable genomic biomarkers which could flag bad cancers as early as possible regardless phenotypic features of the tumor. In the current study, we assessed protein expression of two promising (PTEN and ERG) prognostic biomarkers in early prostate cancers. We found that both biomarkers were significantly associated with unfavorable clinical and pathological outcomes after surgery. Patients who had concomitant aberrations of both biomarkers progressed faster to advanced disease. ERG expression was relatively consistent between and within tumor nodules, whereas PTEN loss was strikingly variable across tumor foci and this aberration mainly was coming from driver tumor foci. These observations may have an important impact on biopsy sampling and triaging the men having both PTEN loss and ERG expression in early prostate cancer. Co-existence of both events portends the worst outcome. Unlike ERG, the high rate of variability of PTEN loss among tumor foci may make PTEN assessment more susceptible to sampling error at the time of diagnosis.