Urinary exosomal prostate-specific antigen is a noninvasive biomarker to detect prostate cancer: Not only old wine in new bottles

The study aimed at evaluating the performance of urinary exosomal prostate-specific antigen (UE-PSA) to predict the results of initial prostate biopsies and discriminate clinically significant prostate cancer (Gleason score < 7, csPCa) from nonsignificant PCa (Gleason score < 7, nsPCa) plus benign patients. Two hundred seventy-two consecutive participants were admitted who underwent a prostate biopsy. The UE-PSA expression was detected by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The predictive power and clinical value of UE-PSA was assessed by receiver operating characteristic (ROC), decision curve analysis (DCA) and waterfall plots. UE-PSA was upregulated in PCa compared to benign patients (P < .001) and csPCa compared to nsPCa plus benign patients (P < .001). UE-PSA achieved an AUC of 0.953 (0.905-0.989) in distinguishing PCa from benign patients and an AUC of 0.879 (0.808-0.941) in predicting csPCa from nsPCa plus benign patients. These results were validated in an additional multicenter cohort. In addition, DCA showed that UE-PSA achieved the highest net benefit at almost any threshold probability compared to tPSA and %fPSA. As the waterfall plot showed, the UE-PSA assay could avoid 57.6% (155 cases) and 34.6% (93 cases) unnecessary biopsies while only missing 2.6% (7 cases) and 1.5% (4 cases) of the cases of csPCa at the cutoff value of 90% and 95% sensitivity, respectively. We validated that UE-PSA presented great diagnostic power and clinical utility to diagnose PCa and csPCa. UE-PSA could be a promising noninvasive biomarker to improve PCa detection.