Mesoscopic characterization of prostate cancer using Raman spectroscopy: potential for diagnostics and therapeutics.

Current diagnostic approaches of PCa using needle biopsies have suboptimal cancer detection rates and a significant risk of infection. Standard non-targeted random sampling results in false-negative biopsies in 15-30% of patients, which affects clinical management. RS, a non-destructive tissue interrogation technique providing vibrational molecular information, resolved the highly complex architecture of the prostate and detect cancer with high accuracy using a fibre optic probe to interrogate radical prostatectomy (RP) specimens from 32 patients (947 spectra). This proof-of-principle paves the way for the development of in vivo tumour targeting spectroscopy tools for informed biopsy collection to address the clinical need for accurate PCa diagnosis and possibly to improve surgical resection during RP as a complement to histopathological analysis.