Every year around this time, I find myself thinking about the men in my life: fathers, brothers, friends, colleagues, and about a disease that will touch a startling number of them. This year, the numbers are especially hard to look past. The American Cancer Society projects roughly 333,830 new prostate cancer diagnoses in the United States in 2026 and about 36,320 deaths. Put plainly, prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in American men after skin cancer, accounting for close to a third of all cancer diagnoses in men. Roughly one in eight men will hear the words “you have prostate cancer” at some point in their life.
I want to use this space not to alarm anyone, but to make a case for something I believe in deeply and something that sits at the very center of why Golden Helix exists.
The good news, and the part that keeps me up at night
There is genuinely good news in the data. Most men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not die from it. More than 3.5 million American men are living with a prostate cancer diagnosis today, and five-year survival for disease caught early is extraordinarily high. But the trend underneath those headline numbers deserves attention. After years of decline, prostate cancer incidence has been climbing again and the sharpest increases are in regional- and distant-stage disease, the cancers found after they have already spread. Advanced-stage diagnoses are rising across men of all ages. The disparities are just as sobering: Black men are diagnosed at markedly higher rates and are roughly twice as likely to die from the disease as White men.
Cancer caught early is often manageable. Cancer caught late is a different fight. The distance between those two outcomes is, more than ever, a matter of information knowing who is at risk, knowing when to screen, and knowing what is actually driving a particular tumor.
Prostate cancer is, at its core, a genomic disease
This is where my professional world and this awareness month meet. We tend to talk about prostate cancer as one thing. Genomically, it is many. And a meaningful share of it is inherited. Pathogenic variants in genes such as BRCA2, BRCA1, ATM, CHEK2, PALB2, and HOXB13 measurably raise a man’s risk and BRCA2 in particular is associated with both higher risk and more aggressive, faster-moving disease. Germline BRCA2 variants alone are estimated to underlie somewhere in the range of 4–6% of prostate cancers. Many of these genes sit in the DNA damage repair pathway, which turns out to matter enormously — not just for who gets the disease, but for how it can be treated.
That knowledge changes real decisions:
- Earlier, smarter screening. Men who carry a BRCA2 variant are now advised to begin PSA screening at a younger age. A father’s or brother’s diagnosis is not just family history — it can be a genomic signal worth acting on.
- Treatment matched to the tumor. Major oncology guidelines now converge on offering germline and tumor genomic testing to men with advanced or very high-risk prostate cancer, regardless of family history. When testing reveals a defect in a DNA repair gene, it can point toward targeted therapies, PARP inhibitors, for example that would otherwise never have been on the table.
- Answers for the whole family. A germline finding in one man is information his sons, brothers, and relatives can use to understand their own risk long before symptoms appear.
None of this works without the ability to take raw sequencing data and turn it into a clear, trustworthy clinical answer. And that is precisely the problem we get out of bed to solve.
Why this is personal for Golden Helix
For more than two decades, our mission has not changed: to enable precision medicine by giving clinical laboratories software they can rely on. Our platform takes next-generation sequencing data and helps labs identify, interpret, and report the variants that matter, germline and somatic, inherited risk and tumor biology, all in one workflow, held to standards like the ACMG guidelines and built under a rigorous quality system.
When I read that advanced-stage prostate cancer is on the rise, I don’t just see a statistic. I see thousands of samples that need to be analyzed accurately, quickly, and reproducibly because behind each one is a man and a family waiting on an answer. Every variant a lab interprets correctly is a screening decision made earlier, a therapy matched more precisely, a relative who learns to watch for something they can now catch in time.
That is the whole point of precision medicine: the right information, about the right person, at the right moment.
A simple ask
So my ask this month is a small one. If you are a man over 50 or over 45 with a family history or of higher-risk background, have the conversation with your doctor about screening. If prostate or breast cancer runs in your family, ask whether genetic testing makes sense for you. Encourage the men you love to do the same.
Awareness is where it starts. But awareness becomes action through knowledge and helping the world act on genomic knowledge is the work we are proud to do every single day.
Here’s to catching more of it early.
Andreas
Golden Helix builds clinical genomics software used by laboratories worldwide to analyze and interpret NGS data across germline, oncology, prenatal, and pharmacogenomics workflows. Learn more at goldenhelix.com.
Sources: American Cancer Society, Cancer Facts & Figures 2026; NCI SEER Program; peer-reviewed literature on the genomics of prostate cancer. This article is for awareness and educational purposes and is not medical advice. Screening and testing decisions should be made with your physician.
