The Stockholm3 prostate cancer diagnostic developed at the Karolinska Institutet, has been awarded funding from the EU’s EIT Health cluster to carry out clinical validation of the test in Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium.
The British Prostate Cancer Foundation has previously announced that it will financially support the evaluation of the test in the UK.
The Stockholm3 diagnostic is a blood test for distinguishing aggressive cancers that will grow rapidly. In clinical studies involving almost 60,000 participants, the test was 20 per cent more effective in identifying aggressive cancers, reducing the number of unnecessary biopsies by 50 per cent.
The diagnostic, which has been available in Sweden since December 2016, combines five protein biomarkers, over 100 genetic markers, clinical data and a decision algorithm to assess the risk of a prostate tumour growing rapidly.