Mumbai, September 30, 2026: In India, prostate cancer is the second most commonly diagnosed cancer in men, but it is not a single molecularly uniform disease. As a result, one of the biggest challenges researchers for researchers is to understand why some tumours remain relatively indolent while others become aggressive, spread beyond the prostate, and eventually develop resistance to treatment.
DSS Takara Bio India, a joint venture company between India’s DSS Imagetech Pvt Ltd and Japan’s Takara Bio Inc, supports researchers with technologies for molecular profiling, transcriptomics and low-input sequencing workflows, helping investigators generate genomic and transcriptomic insights from challenging biological samples.
“Prostate cancer is a highly heterogeneous disease, with different tumour regions within the same patient potentially carrying distinct molecular alterations. Understanding how these populations evolve and contribute to metastatic disease is therefore an important area of research. A number of recent studies on the disease have incorporated DSS Takara’s complementary technologies to illustrate the molecular events associated with metastatic progression. Together, these approaches are helping the fraternity to build a more comprehensive picture of prostate cancer—one that extends beyond what can be observed from a single tissue biopsy,” said Harkaran Dhingra, CEO, DSS Takara Bio India.
Some of DSS Takara’s technologies that have been recently incorporated in prostate cancer studies are SMART-Seq Stranded, SMART-Seq mRNA, NucleoMag NGS cleanup and ThruPLEX Tag-Seq, across tissue transcriptomics and liquid-biopsy research workflows.
Recent research demonstrates how different genomic approaches can provide complementary perspectives on prostate cancer biology:
- Tumour tissue genomics and transcriptomics can reveal molecular pathways and alterations associated with tumour evolution and metastatic progression.
- CTC transcriptomics can provide insights into tumour lineage states and molecular heterogeneity from blood-derived cells.
- cfDNA sequencing can investigate tumour-derived genomic alterations from plasma and potentially capture aspects of tumour heterogeneity over time.
- Sensitive library preparation and sequencing workflows are critical when working with challenging samples containing limited amounts of biological material.
- Liquid biopsy approaches offer researchers another way to study tumour-derived material circulating in the bloodstream.
“These approaches are particularly relevant because prostate cancer is not a single molecularly uniform disease. The ability to examine DNA and RNA across different sample types therefore offers researchers an increasingly integrated view of disease biology. As prostate cancer research moves toward increasingly comprehensive molecular profiling, the quality and sensitivity of sample-to-data workflows become increasingly important,” adds Mr. Harkiran. As the field continues to evolve, integrating information from tumor tissue, CTCs and circulating DNA could help researchers better understand how prostate cancer develops, progresses and changes over time.