Prostate cancer is one of the most frequently diagnosed cancers and a leading cause of cancer death in men worldwide. Existing methods of diagnosis and monitoring of prostate cancer are inadequate due to their invasiveness, inaccuracy, cost, access uneven, etc., making difficult the diagnosis and patient's follow up. New techniques and methods are necessary to improve diagnosis.~Biological liquids might represent an attractive target to isolate prostate tumour cells for these purposes. In recent years, several studies have been carried out with the aim of reducing and / or avoiding the limits of sensitivity and specificity of current methods of screening for prostate cancer and thus obtain new biomarkers for the diagnosis and / or non-invasive monitoring.~However, due to technical and technological difficulties few studies have been performed to investigate the non-invasive isolation and direct analysis of tumour cells. Our project is therefore an innovative project which aims to study a new approach for the early diagnosis of prostate cancer, with better sensitivity and specificity.
The purpose of this study is to isolate and characterize tumor cells non-invasively from biological samples in patients with prostate cancer and demonstrate the ability to identify the presence and number of tumor cells before prostate biopsy.