Canary Prostate Active Surveillance Study: design of a multi-institutional active surveillance cohort and biorepository.

Active surveillance is a management plan for localized prostate cancer that offers selective delayed intervention on indication of disease progression, allowing patients to delay or avoid treatment and associated side-effects. Outcomes from centers that promote active surveillance are favorable, with high rates of disease-specific survival. However, there remains a need for prognostic variables or biomarkers that distinguish with high specificity the aggressive cancers that progress on surveillance from the indolent cancers. The Canary Prostate Active Surveillance Study is a multicenter study and a biorepository that will discover and confirm biomarkers of aggressive disease as defined by histologic, prostate-specific antigen, or clinical criteria. 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.