Marvin Langston
Stanford University, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Should men be screened for prostate cancer, and if so, who, starting when, and how often? The blood test used for screening measures prostate-specific antigen (PSA), and the evidence is genuinely conflicted: routine PSA screening lowers deaths from prostate cancer, but it also finds many cancers that would never have caused harm, leading to biopsies and treatments men did not need.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
prostate cancer
prostate-specific antigen
cancer screening
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- 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.
- Determine the optimal interval before re-screening after a baseline PSA test, so that men with higher age-specific levels are tested more often and those with lower levels less often.
- Identify groups of men at age 60 whose PSA history suggests they could consider stopping screening, drawing on more than five decades of follow-up in an integrated health system.
- Test whether Black men, who have higher rates of aggressive and fatal prostate cancer, should begin PSA screening earlier and be screened more frequently than White men.
- Assess whether adding other prostate-specific kallikreins to total PSA in banked serum improves prediction of clinically relevant prostate cancer, using a nested case-cohort design.
More about the research
One way out is risk-stratified screening, in which a man's baseline PSA level sets how often he is screened afterward — frequent testing for those with high levels for their age, sparse testing for those with low levels. Several US advisory groups endorse this, but the US Preventive Services Task Force has asked for validation studies with longer follow-up before recommending it.
Why it matters
Because the best way to screen for prostate cancer is unsettled, large numbers of men undergo invasive, costly and ultimately unnecessary biopsies and treatments. Using decades of health-system records and banked serum to determine who should be screened, when to start, how often, and when to stop — including tailored guidance for Black men at higher risk — could inform screening recommendations that preserve the reduction in prostate cancer deaths while reducing physical, psychological and financial harm.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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.
Martin Sanda
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
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.
Adriana Coletta
University of Utah, UT·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether 52 weeks of creatine monohydrate plus home-based telehealth resistance training preserves muscle mass better than placebo plus training in 200 men with metastatic castration-sensitive prostate cancer on androgen deprivation therapy.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
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