The study ‘shows that measurement using a urine test provides improved accuracy relative to other measurement methods, for example certain kinds of blood tests,’ a KI news release states
Researchers at the Karolinska Institute (KI) in Sweden have developed a non-invasive urine-based test that can identify what type of asthma a patient has and its severity. If developed into a clinical laboratory diagnostic, such a test also could give clinicians a better idea of what treatment is more likely to be effective—a core goal of precision medicine.
Another benefit of this methodology is that it is a non-invasive test. Should further studies conclude that this urine-based test produces accurate results acceptable for clinical settings, medical laboratories would certainly be interested in offering this assay, particularly for use in pediatric patients who are uncomfortable with the venipunctures needed to collect blood specimens. Also, given the incidence of asthma in the United States, there is the potential for a urine-based asthma test to generate a substantial number of test requests.
The objective of the study, according to the Karolinska Institute researchers, was “To test if urinary eicosanoid metabolites can direct asthma phenotyping.” The team used mass spectrometry to measured certain lipid biomarkers (prostaglandins and leukotrienes), which are known to play a key role in the inflammation that occurs during asthma attacks.
According to a KI news release, “The study is based on data from the U-BIOPRED study (Unbiased BIOmarkers in PREDiction of respiratory disease outcomes), which was designed to investigate severe asthma. The study included 400 participants with severe asthma, which often requires treatment with corticosteroid tablets, nearly 100 individuals with milder forms of asthma, and 100 healthy control participants.”
“We discovered particularly high levels of the metabolites of the mast cell mediator prostaglandin D2 and the eosinophil product leukotriene C4 in asthma patients with what is referred to as Type 2 inflammation. Using our methodology, we were able to measure these metabolites with high accuracy and link their levels to the severity and type of asthma,” said Johan Kolmert, PhD (above), a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolina Institute, and first author of the study, in the KI news release. If perfected, such accuracy could lead to effective precision medicine clinical laboratory tests. (Photo copyright: Karolinska Institute.)
More Accurate Testing Could Lead to Biomarker-guided Precision Medicine
In the US alone, 25,131,132 people currently suffer from asthma, about five million of which are children under the age of 18, according to 2019 CDC statistics. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that worldwide, “Asthma affected an estimated 262 million people in 2019 and caused 461,000 deaths.”
People with mild asthma may have good success using steroid inhalers. However, for those with moderate to severe asthma where inhalers are not effective, oral corticosteroids may also be necessary. But corticosteroids have been associated with high blood pressure and diabetes, among other negative side effects.
“To replace corticosteroid tablets, in recent times several biological medicines have been introduced to treat patients with Type 2 inflammation characterized by increased activation of mast cells and eosinophils,” said Sven-Erik Dahlén, Professor at the Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institute, in the news release.
Currently, there are no simple tests that show what type of asthma a patient has. Instead, clinicians rely on lung function tests, patient interviews, allergy tests, and blood tests.
Earlier this year, researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Exosome Diagnostics in Massachusetts investigated a non-invasive, urine-based test for transplant rejection. According to a news release, “Patients can spend up to six years waiting for a kidney transplant. Even when they do receive a transplant, up to 20% of patients will experience rejection.”
“If rejection is not treated, it can lead to scarring and complete kidney failure. Because of these problems, recipients can face life-long challenges,” said Jamil Azzi, MD, Director of the Kidney Transplantation Fellowship Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard School of Medicine. “Our goal is to develop better tools to monitor patients without performing unnecessary biopsies. We try to detect rejection early, so we can treat it before scarring develops,” he said.
Detecting Bladder Cancer with Urine Testing
Another condition where urine tests are being investigated is bladder cancer. An article in Trends in Urology and Men’s Health states, “Several point-of-care urine tests have been developed to help identify patients who may be at higher risk of bladder cancer.” Those tests could have the potential for use in primary care, which could mean fewer people would need invasive, painful, and risk-carrying cystoscopies.
“New tests to help identify hematuria patients who are at a higher risk of cancer would help to improve the diagnostic pathway, reduce the number diagnosed by emergency presentation, lessen the burden on urology services, and spare those who do not have cancer an invasive and costly examination, such as cystoscopy,” the article’s authors wrote.
These urine-based tests are still under investigation by various research teams and more research is needed before clinical trials can be conducted and the tests can be submitted for regulatory approval. Though still in the early stages of development, urine-based diagnostic testing represents far less invasive, and therefore safer, ways to identify and treat various diseases.
Studies into how the elements in urine might be used as biomarkers for clinical laboratory tests may lead to improved non-invasive precision medicine diagnostics that could save many lives.
The researchers believe their test ‘could reduce the number of unnecessary prostate cancer biopsies by 32%,’ UEA reported
New diagnostic technologies may make it possible for men to provide a urine sample that can allow a clinical laboratory to not only accurately diagnose prostate cancer but also help determine whether it is an aggressive form of prostate cancer. Researchers in the United Kingdom (UK) recently described just such a test in an online, peer-reviewed journal.
Development of a non-invasive method of diagnosing prostate cancer would be significant for anatomic pathologists in the United States. In the US alone, approximately 248,000 men will be diagnosed with this type of cancer in 2021. Prostate biopsies represent a major proportion of case referrals to community pathology groups.
Moreover, were such a non-invasive test for prostate cancer also able to identify those individuals with fast-growing prostate cancers, that would help urologists make more informed treatment decisions.
A Disease Men More Commonly Die ‘With’ Rather than ‘From’
According to CDC statistics, most men over the age of 80 will have some form of slow-growing prostate cancer when they die. However, a percentage of men each year contract a rapidly growing aggressive form of the cancer, and until recently, diagnosing which cancer a patient was fighting often required multiple invasive prostate needle biopsies. But that may soon change.
Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) Norwich Medical School in the United Kingdom (UK) have developed a non-invasive urine test for prostate cancer that they say also can determine the aggressiveness of the disease. Knowing this may help physicians better assess a patient’s risk prior to ordering invasive needle biopsies, a UEA article notes.
The UEA test may also allow for self-collection of the biological sample, and if it proves accurate, the test could bring additional revenue to clinical laboratories that would perform the urine testing.
“In this work we develop a test that predicts whether a patient has prostate cancer and how aggressive the disease is from a urine sample. This model combines the measurement of a protein-marker called EN2 and the levels of 10 genes measured in urine and proves that integration of information from multiple, non-invasive biomarker sources has the potential to greatly improve how patients with a clinical suspicion of prostate cancer are risk-assessed prior to an invasive biopsy,” they wrote.
“While prostate cancer is responsible for a large proportion of all male cancer deaths, it is more commonly a disease men die with rather than from,” said Daniel Brewer, PhD, one of the lead researchers on this study. “Therefore, there is a desperate need for improvements in diagnosing and predicting outcomes for prostate cancer patients to minimize over-diagnosis and overtreatment whilst appropriately treating men with aggressive disease, especially if this can be done without taking an invasive biopsy.
“Invasive biopsies come at considerable economic, psychological, and societal cost to patients and healthcare systems alike,” he added. Brewer is Senior Lecturer in Cancer Bioinformatics and a group leader within the Cancer Genetics Team at UEA’s Norwich Medical School.
“Our new urine test not only shows whether a patient has prostate cancer, but it importantly shows how aggressive the disease is. This allows patients and doctors to select the correct treatment,” said Daniel Brewer, PhD (above), Senior Lecturer and Lead Researcher, UEA Norwich Medical School, in the news release. (Photo copyright: Eastern Daily Press.)
Possibility of Reducing Needle Biopsies by 32%
Called “ExoGrail,” the UEA’s new test builds on their earlier development of the Prostate Urine Risk (PUR) and ExoMeth tests. The test works by integrating two biomarkers.
Levels of gene expression of 10 genes related to prostate cancer.
The researchers tested ExoGrail on urine samples from 207 patients at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital (NNUH) who also had needle biopsy samples available.
According to the published study, the UEA ExoGrail urine test enabled:
Results comparable to the biopsy findings.
Identification of people with prostate cancer and people without it.
Risk scoring that noted aggressive prostate cancer and need for biopsy.
Potential to reduce unnecessary biopsies by 32%.
“ExoGrail resulted in accurate predictions even when serum PSA [protein-specific antigen] levels alone proved inaccurate; patients with a raised PSA but negative biopsy result possessed ExoGrail scores significantly different from both clinically benign patients and those with low-grade Gleason 6 disease, whilst still able to discriminate between more clinically significant Gleason ≥ 7 cancers,” the researchers stated in their published study.
“The adoption of ExoGrail into current clinical pathways for reducing unnecessary biopsies was considered, showing the potential for up to 32% of patients to safely forgo an invasive biopsy without incurring excessive risk,” they noted.
Prostate Cancer Patients May Soon Have Options
While more research is needed, the new UEA Norwich Medical School ExoGrail test introduces compelling non-invasive methods for diagnosing prostate cancer. Patients with findings of aggressive cancer can proceed to biopsies, while others determined to have non-aggressive forms of prostate cancer may be able to avoid more invasive tests and the associated costs and stress.
Additionally, men may soon be able to collect their own specimens without the need to visit the primary care doctor or a patient service center.
A follow-up study underway at the University of East Anglia and the NNUH involves sending 2,000 men in the UK, Europe, and Canada home testing “prostate screening boxes” to “to collect men’s urine samples at-home,” according to a UEA new release, which noted that “the Prostate Screening Box has been developed in collaboration with REAL Digital International Limited to create a kit that fits through a standard letterbox.”
“We have developed the PUR (Prostate Urine Risk) test, which looks at gene expression in urine samples and provides vital information about whether a cancer is aggressive or ‘low risk,’” said Jeremy Clark, PhD, Senior Research Associate at UEA’s Norwich Medical School.
“The Prostate Screening Box part sounds like quite a small innovation, but it means that in future the monitoring of cancer in men could be so much less stressful for them and reduce the number of expensive trips to the hospital,” he added.
Anatomic pathologists and clinical laboratory managers will want to follow the progress of these clinical studies. A non-invasive, urine-based test for prostate cancer could be a game-changer if it can detect prostate cancer with comparable accuracy to the tissue-based diagnostics that are the current standard of care in the diagnosis of prostate cancer.
