Prostate‐specific Membrane Antigen‐derived Primers in a Nested Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction for Detecting Prostatic Cancer Cells

The detection of prostate‐specific membrane antigen (PSM) mRNA in the peripheral blood of prostate cancer patients by a nested reverse transcriptase‐polymerase chain reaction (RT‐PCR) assay is a useful and sensitive method for the identification of small foci of metastatic lesions. In this study, a nested RT‐PCR assay was performed using the two different PSM‐derived oligonucleotide primer sets reported by Israeli et al. and Loric et al. (termed PSM primers‐1 and primers‐2, respectively, in this report), and the differences in the specificity and sensitivity of these primer sets for detecting prostate cancer cells in the blood are discussed. The PCR assay using PSM primers‐1 showed DNA bands for 4 of 7 cases of metastatic prostate cancer and amplified the untreated genomic DNA, while that using PSM primers‐2 showed 6 bands without the amplification of the genomic DNA. In conclusion, PSM primers‐2 is superior to PSM primers‐1 for the detection of PSM mRNA in the peripheral blood of prostate cancer patients.