Transperineal Prostate Biopsy: A Practical Startup Guide

[Dr. Aditya Bagrodia]
Hey, thanks for spending some time with us this afternoon. As I was preparing for this podcast, I was thinking to myself, I grew up on transrectal and fire biopsies, my blocks worked, my clinically significant cancer detection rates for zones three, four, and five were 30%, 60%, and 90%. Every year or so there was a patient who got a bout of sepsis from his biopsy. Why rock the boat? Why do I need to change anything?

[Dr. Matt Halloway]
That is the question and there are two answers to the question. Obviously, the first is complications, which span from rectal bleeding, to infections, to sepsis. In fact, in Norway, they've essentially banned the transrectal biopsy because in that smaller country, they had a handful, five to eight, of deaths a year from a prostate biopsy. We've got complications on one side and then we have cancer detection on the other. There's definitely a building body of data that's showing that the transperineal approach offers the trajectory in order to really sample the prostate properly.

To understand the prostate you've got to understand that these zones are all pancaked within each other and it's not shaped like a rectangle or a box. It's a complicated sphere and we know now where the cancers are hiding and we know just by simple logic of geometrical vectors that going transrectal is not doing the best job of capturing the disease. Those I think are the two issues that in my life pushed me to dedicate the last eight years of research and work in industry to try to change that.