High levels of TK1 predicts early death in prostate cancer
A new peer-reviewed article about thymidine kinase 1 (TK1) has been published in the journal The Prostate. The 30-year study shows an association between high initial levels of serum TK1 and mortality. Prostate cancer-specific survival was on average 9 years shorter for patients with high sTK1 levels than patients with low levels at screening.
Researchers at the Karolinska Institute and Karolinska University Hospitals analyzed 30-year-old blood samples from a prostate screening study conducted at Södersjukhuset in 1988. TK1 was analyzed with AroCells TK 210 ELISA test and the results were compared to long-term patient outcomes and survival. A significant correlation between elevated TK1 at screening and subsequent early death from prostate cancer was found.
The article Serum thymidine kinase 1 concentration as a predictive biomarker in prostate cancer can be found at https://doi.org/10.1002/pros.24335
“Results of this study in combination with earlier publications; show that AroCells TK 210 ELISA can assist in the diagnosis, treatment efficiency evaluation, and outcome predictions in different cancers. But also, overall survival expectations for patients. Our aim is to use TK 210 ELISA in a clinical setting and make TK1 a gold standard in personalized medicine”, says Anders Hultman, CEO of AroCell.
Earlier studies with shorter follow-ups and different endpoints are consistent with the results obtained. Another Swedish study compared a panel of biomarkers on a cohort of newly diagnosed men and was able to show that TK1 predicted death in prostate cancer in the short-term setting, within 3 years of sampling, better than, for example, PSA. In a Finnish prostate cancer study, the group with metastases had a statistically significantly higher TK1 value and in survival analysis, TK1 was a statistically significant predictor of death, cancer-specific and general.