Warrington man urges men not to ignore symptoms as Prostate Cancer UK funds breakthrough research into disease

A Warrington man diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer is urging men not to ignore symptoms - as new research funded by Prostate Cancer UK offers better survival chances to those with the deadliest form of the disease.

We're told the £1.5m project, which uses artificial intelligence and cutting-edge genetic analysis, has the potential to revolutionise the way men with the deadliest prostate cancers are diagnosed and treated.

The research is led by Professor Ros Eeles at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, with the team including world-leading experts from around the UK.

The new tool could predict whether a man’s prostate cancer will be aggressive at the point of diagnosis, enabling doctors to give the best, targeted treatment quickly before it spreads and becomes too late to cure.

The project team has collected data from blood and tumour samples from 2,000 men with prostate cancer across nine countries. They will now use advanced artificial intelligence to analyse the data, looking for genetic patterns that will unlock answers to which DNA changes are linked to aggressive cancers that spread quickly. With this, they’ll develop an AI model that can predict whether a man’s cancer is likely to be aggressive, based on a simple blood sample.

Matt Newton,51, from Warrington was diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer last year. He's urging men not to ignore changes to their bodies: "I noticed I had been going to the toilet a little bit more than usual, even after drinking small amounts of water. I made an appointment with my GP and they gave me some routine blood tests. They didn't find anything untoward in that. Then the GP asked if I'd had A PSA test. I didn't know what it was.

"The results of that came back pretty quickly, and my PSA score was high. I got referred to a urologist who did further tests like an X-ray, an MRI scan and other scans, which revealed that the prostate cancer had spread to the bone.

"I went through a course of chemotherapy, which was 18 weeks, and shortly after that I had 20 sessions of radiotherapy. I'm on daily medication now and six monthly hormone tablets, so hopefully the treatment I've got has given me a little bit more extra time to to play with."

1 in 8 men will get prostate cancer, and lots of these men will have aggressive disease that spreads and becomes incurable quickly – but at the moment it’s hard for doctors to know which men this will happen to.

Matt is now advocating for men to get checked if they have any concerns: "I sat on my blood forms for about six weeks because it wasn't important in my head. It was just another blood test. Thankfully, it was my wife who noticed that that my forms were on on my desk and she said, are you going to get that done? I said, yeah, yeah, I will do at some point. And it's a good job I did.

"Don't put it off. Don't be ignorant about it. It's better to be told early than be in my position. Even if you're not sure, go and get checked."