Prostate cancer PCa is one of the most common cancers and leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men. Mass screening has been carried out since the s using prostate-specific antigen PSA levels in the serum as a PCa biomarker. However, although PSA is an excellent organ-specific marker, it is not a cancer-specific marker. Therefore, the aim of this study was to discover new biomarkers for the diagnosis of PCa.
This peptide was identified as a C-terminal PSA fragment composed of 19 amino acid residues. The results of the present study indicate that the Da peptide fragment of PSA may become a new pathognomonic biomarker for the diagnosis of PCa.
A further large-scale investigation is currently underway to assess the possibility of using this peptide in the early detection of PCa. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. All relevant data are within the paper. The funder had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Shimadzu Corporation provided support in the form of salaries for authors, Sadanori Sekiya, Shigeki Kajihara, Shin-Ichiro Kawabata, Shinichi Iwamoto and Koichi Tanaka, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. There are no patents, products in development or marketed products to declare. Prostate cancer PCa is one of the most common cancers and the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men [1].
