Early diagnosis of prostatic carcinoma based on in vitro culture of viable tumor cells harvested by prostatic massage.

Prostatic cancer is diagnosed too late in most cases, so that therapy is frequently ineffective or even not undertaken at all because of the already advanced stage of the disease. An early diagnosis technique for prostatic cancer would therefore be highly desirable, also because all other available markers give very unsatisfactory results. Because of our experience in tissue culture of human prostatic specimens, by which we have shown good correlations with patient prognosis, we attempted to grow epithelial cells collected from prostatic fluid after rectal prostatic massage. Samples from prostatic cancer patients, diagnosed by needle biopsy, were grown in culture and were able to survive in vitro for at least 2 weeks, thus providing morphological and biochemical data concerning their neoplastic and differentiation features. The early data on this new approach, which we believe might represent a very useful test for the early diagnosis of the neoplasm, are reported here. The method is noninvasive and suitable for mass screening of the disease. Accuracy and reliability of the technique are currently being tested.