If you’ve seen much live music, you’ll know what it’s like when the bass rumbles into your ribcage. Vibrations like that are powerful. They pull hearts onto their rhythm and make vast crowds of people move as one.

That power is just as profound on the tiniest scale, where our researchers are using vibes to improve how we diagnose prostate cancer.

At Cardiff University, Professor Aled Clayton, Dr Isobella Honeyborne, Xiaoyan Zhang and Dr Chris Yang have built a very specific type of sound bath. It’s not quite the type you’d find on a wellness retreat, but it might be even better for your health.

The team’s device sends pulses of sound through the crowds of tiny particles that float in fluids like blood and urine to help extract tiny bubbles of information called vesicles. It has the potential to make diagnosing prostate cancer much more efficient – and, crucially, cut the number of men who need invasive surgical tests.

Building a blood test for prostate cancer

Vesicles are round, fat-wrapped packages our cells use to transport important signals and substances. The ones that travel into our blood and urine come from all over the body, which makes them useful for understanding what’s going on in different organs. If someone has prostate cancer, vesicles from their prostate are likely to contain information that could help doctors diagnose and treat them.

But there’s a hitch. There are many different types of vesicles in each blood or urine sample, and their signals can be drowned out by the other particles in the mix. Clayton and his team are working on a method for tuning all that other ‘noise’ out.

“We’re building a machine that uses sound waves to create gentle forces inside a drop of serum sample,” explained Clayton. “These forces will move the vesicles into the centre of the liquid droplet and allow us to collect a clean and concentrated sample rich in vesicles.”

In live music terms, it’s a bit like pushing the vesicles into their own (gentle) mosh pit.

“Our prototype machine can perform this processing in salty-water specimens very quickly, within 30 to 40 seconds,” Clayton said. “We’re now refining it so that it can achieve this effect with complicated real samples like blood serum, which are full of vesicles and other particles.”

Supporting prostate biopsies with liquid biopsies

This is still early-stage research – you won’t be able to stream it or get the vinyl anytime soon. And it’s not a solo act, either; it’s designed to help doctors make the best use of our other instruments.

The most important of those is the prostate biopsy, a surgical procedure that involves taking a sample of cells directly from someone’s prostate.

Prostate biopsies are essential for confirming that someone has prostate cancer and deciding on a treatment. But the surgery they require is invasive and can be uncomfortable, and it comes with a small risk of infection.

On top of that, many prostate biopsies show that people don’t have cancer. Others will lead to people being diagnosed with slow-growing types of cancer that will never cause them problems.

What’s missing is a better way of deciding who needs more invasive tests.

Clayton hopes his team’s sound wave device (which is a type of liquid biopsy) will help show who does and doesn’t need a prostate biopsy, so they aren’t offered to as many people who don’t have prostate cancer, or who have cancers that won’t cause them any harm.

“We need better diagnostic testing for prostate cancer, and the analysis of vesicles in blood or urine holds a lot of potential,” said Clayton. “They carry a host of molecules that have come from the cancer cells, and our machine can help us analyse them rapidly.

“The rich information provided could be used together with other measurements such as the PSA test, MRI scans and measures of urinary symptoms to help doctors make more informed decisions about who truly needs a biopsy.”

Changing how prostate cancer is diagnosed

The way the NHS looks for prostate cancer is already changing. 

In November 2025, the UK National Screening Committee (UK NSC) published a draft recommendation for a targeted prostate cancer screening programme. If it’s implemented according to the draft, the programme will offer a PSA test to all 45 to 61-year-old men with identified BRCA mutations every two years. The UK NSC is now running a consultation period and will deliver a final recommendation after reviewing and considering feedback on the draft.

As it stands, the draft programme would help diagnose aggressive prostate cancer earlier, when treatment is most likely to be effective, and help save lives among those at high genetic risk. But there’s much more to do. The currently available tests aren’t suitable for a wider screening programme, and there’s room to improve how we diagnose prostate cancer outside screening, too.

That’s why work like Clayton’s is so important – it has the potential to improve how we detect early prostate cancer and identify which cancers need treatment to stop them causing harm. With tools that do that, we can help make sure more men get to keep enjoying music’s good vibrations for years to come.