In the UK alone, the aggressive form of cancer affects around 52,000 men every year.

Researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Manchester have revealed that prostate cancer is not just a single disease and is made up of two different evotypes – subtypes of the disease.

Published in Cell Genomics, the study, funded by Cancer Research UK and Prostate Cancer Research, used artificial intelligence (AI) to reveal a new form of aggressive prostate cancer.

Currently the most common cancer affecting men in the UK, prostate cancer is responsible for around 52,000 cases every year.

As part of the Pan Prostate Cancer Group; an international consortium set up by the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and the University of East Anglia (UEA), researchers applied AI to analyse the genetic data of 159 prostate cancer patient samples across nine countries.

Using whole genome sequencing to study changes in the DNA of prostate cancer samples, researchers then identified two different cancer groups among these patients using an AI technique known as neural networks.

Using their findings, the team went even further and integrated all the information to generate an evolutionary tree to portray how the two subtypes of prostate cancer developed, showing two distinct evotypes.

Researchers hope that their findings could revolutionise how prostate cancer is diagnosed and treated, ultimately leading to more tailored treatments for individual patients according to a genetic test delivered using AI.

Dr Dan Woodcock from the Nuffield department of surgical sciences, University of Oxford, said: “Our research demonstrates that prostate tumours evolve along multiple pathways, leading to two distinct disease types” and “allows us to classify tumours based on how the cancer evolves rather than solely on individual gene mutations or expression patterns”.

Professor Colin Cooper, researcher from UEA Norwich Medical School, commented: “We hope that the findings will not only save lives through better diagnosis and tailored treatments in the future, but they may help researchers working in other cancer fields better understand other types of cancer too.”