A U.S. robotic surgery expert says a new technique promises to provide new insights into how prostate cancer develops.

Dr. David Samadi - chief of robotics and minimally invasive surgery at The Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York - says the technique allows for keeping the surgically removed prostate gland alive and functioning for as much as a week in the lab without the usual loss of “tissue architecture.”

“This tissue architecture is what holds the clue to why certain therapies work and others don’t, which is why the best model is the intact, live prostate gland,” Samadi says in a statement.

“This is an exciting development in prostate cancer news because it can help scientists better predict how living prostate glands will respond to therapy in a controlled environment.”

Scientists at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, University of Helsinki and Stanford University based the technique on tissue-culture technology used to repair DNA damage caused by cancer.

“This knowledge could eventually help scientists develop therapies to target these DNA repair proteins and eventually help them test the response of experimental drugs on prostate cancer tissues,” Samadi says. “So it will be very interesting to see where this discovery will lead us.”

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NEW YORK, Nov. 19 (UPI)