New test for prostate cancer could save more Black lives

A new at-home spit test for prostate cancer could allow thousands of men to receive earlier diagnoses – including Black men who were previously excluded from such tests.

- NADINE WHITE

The NHS is launching a £2m trial of the new saliva test, led by researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research, which will examine whether it can speed up prostate cancer diagnoses.

Spit tests calculate the risk of prostate cancer from DNA extracted from saliva, and have previously indicated a higher accuracy than the standard blood test – the prostate-specific antigen (or PSA) test – for men with a high risk of developing the disease. Those identified as high risk will be recalled for further screening.

The original saliva test, trialled in 2016, could only be used for white people of European ancestry, as the genetic data was not available for Black and Asian men, despite Black men being twice as likely to develop the disease.

Dr Elizabeth Bancroft, nurse consultant in oncogenetics research at the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, told The Independent that this breakthrough is “important”.

“Unfortunately, most of the genetic research that had been published focused only on people of white European ancestry,” she said. “When we first started, the test that we developed was based on this historical research and, for that reason, to be confident that it could be used safely and accurately, we could only offer it to people of white European ancestry, because that’s what the research was based on. That was, unfortunately, the major limitation of that study.”