Test could detect men who would benefit from intensive prostate cancer treatment

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By Storm Newton, Press Association

A new diagnostic test could help identify men with prostate cancer who would benefit from more intensive treatment, a study has found.

It could also spare patients from the side effects of unnecessary therapies.

It comes as researchers led by experts from UCL found that adding the hormone therapy abiraterone to standard treatment for men with high-risk prostate cancer could halve the risk of death and slow disease progression.

The team explored if an additional test, known as Decipher, could be used to pinpoint those who would benefit from this treatment.

Decipher uses a small part of an existing tissue biopsy to analyse 22 genes inside cancer cells to determine how aggressive the tumour is and how likely it is to spread.

The test transforms this data into a score, ranging from calm and less likely to spread, to aggressive with a high risk of spreading.

For the study, which will be presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress 2026 in Madrid, researchers looked at Decipher scores for more than 6,000 men. They found higher scores consistently predicted worse outcomes.