Martin Sanda
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Many men undergo prostate biopsies they do not need. Screening also finds many slow-growing prostate cancers that would never cause harm.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
prostate cancer
early detection
biomarkers
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Validate a 33-gene urinary RNA panel for predicting aggressive prostate cancer on biopsy, using a nested case-control study that follows PRoBE guidelines for unbiased biomarker testing.
- Validate a deep-learning MRI artificial intelligence nomogram, a scoring tool built from MRI scans, for predicting aggressive prostate cancer on biopsy in a prospective study.
- Evaluate how well PET-MRI imaging, which combines a tracer-based scan with MRI, detects clinically significant prostate cancer.
- Assess, with the CISNET modeling network, how cost-effective the new urine biomarkers, AI imaging and detection techniques would be for prostate cancer early detection.
More about the research
The central idea here is that better tests can address both problems. New biomarkers, measurable molecules in blood or urine, could help decide who needs a biopsy. Better imaging could guide the needle to the right spot. Together they could find dangerous cancers while reducing unnecessary biopsies and overtreatment. The work is a clinical validation center within the Early Detection Research Network (EDRN), a national cancer detection research network. It brings together Emory University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham and UT Southwestern.
Why it matters
For men facing possible prostate cancer, validated urine tests, AI-assisted MRI and PET-MRI imaging could reduce unnecessary biopsies. These tools could help doctors find aggressive cancers while sparing men with harmless, slow-growing tumors from treatment they do not need. Cost-effectiveness data could guide which tests health systems adopt. The diverse patient groups enrolled across Atlanta, Birmingham and Dallas could help the results apply broadly.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Marvin Langston
Stanford University, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Evaluate whether obtaining a baseline prostate-specific antigen (PSA) measurement before age 50 improves prediction of later aggressive or fatal prostate cancer, using long-term records and stored serum from the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Multiphasic Health Checkups cohort.
Michael Liss
University of California-San Diego, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Validate whether restricted signal map values from RSI-MRI, a diffusion MRI method sensitive to water trapped in cancer cells, identify clinically significant prostate cancer, comparing PI-RADS scores with and without RSM in a single-arm clinical trial.
Robert Klein
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Genetics
Identify genes whose inherited, genetically controlled expression changes alter the risk of dying from prostate cancer, using a transcriptome-wide association study (TWAS) with prostate-specific models.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
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