A novel study by the National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS) and Canada’s Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, has found that a commercially available genomic test can help to predict outcomes in men with localised prostate cancer.

This genomic classifier (commercial trade name "Decipher") can identify patients who may be treated successfully with radiotherapy alone. This could potentially spare patients from a course of hormonal therapy, which can cause side effects such as ischemic heart disease, stroke, metabolic syndrome and dementia.

Additionally, they found that the test was more accurate in identifying patients with lethal prostate cancer, who may benefit from combination systemic therapy and radiotherapy.

With this finding, NCCS plans to validate the test in local patients, and ultimately use it to improve patient risk stratification and design bespoke precision strategies in the treatment of localised prostate cancer in Singapore.

Decipher testing is commercially available in the United States. Under a research collaboration agreement with Decipher Biosciences, Dr Melvin Chua, a senior consultant radiation oncologist at the NCCS and also one of the Principal Investigators and a co-Senior author of this multi-centre collaboration, will use the Decipher genomic profiling technology in his laboratory. For the clinical implementation, NCCS plans to validate the test in a local cohort of patients in 2019 to 2020, before rolling it out as a clinical test the following year.

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