SPRINTR builds a a national platform for prostate cancer research
Prostate cancer affects around 10,000 men in Sweden each year, but it remains difficult to determine which patients need intensive treatment and which can safely avoid it. The national SPRINTR initiative brings together clinical information, molecular profiling and AI to support more individually tailored treatment decisions.
Prostate cancer can develop very differently from one person to another. Some tumours grow slowly and may never cause serious harm, while others are aggressive and require early treatment. Today, treatment decisions are largely based on clinical risk categories. These provide important guidance but cannot fully capture the biological differences between individual tumours. As a result, some patients may receive treatment they do not need, with a risk of lasting side effects, while others may receive treatment that is insufficient for their disease.
SPRINTR aims to improve this by creating a national environment in which molecular information can be systematically evaluated alongside clinical data. Rather than testing potential biomarkers in separate studies and patient groups, the initiative will make it possible to compare and validate them under shared, real-world conditions.
“To accelerate precision medicine we need to work together. If each group in Sweden keeps studying its own biomarker in its own small cohort, we will still be waiting for answers in ten years. SPRINTR opens for analysing the same patients with the same methods across the country, we can thereby test promising markers side by side and know within a few years which ones actually improve treatment decisions,” says Andreas Josefsson, urologist at Umeå University and principal investigator of SPRINTR.
The foundation of SPRINTR is a prospective patient cohort that is already active at all Swedish university hospitals and around 20 additional healthcare sites. It is expected to include approximately half of all patients newly diagnosed with prostate cancer in Sweden during 2026, with coverage planned to exceed 90 percent by 2028.
A standardized pathology workflow will enable biopsy tissue to be analysed using several complementary technologies, including DNA and RNA sequencing, proteomics, immunohistochemistry and digital pathology. Blood and urine samples will also be collected, while information about imaging, treatments, patient-reported outcomes and long-term disease development will be continuously added.
Bringing these different types of information together could help researchers understand why apparently similar tumours behave differently, identify mechanisms behind treatment resistance and determine which biomarkers are sufficiently reliable for use in healthcare.
“What makes SPRINTR different is that we are not only following all patients over time. We have the ethical approval, the consent and the samples from men diagnosed across the whole country, and we also know how each of them responds to treatment. That means we can go back to the tumours of exactly those patients where treatment failed and look for the biology behind it. By characterising these tumours in depth we hope to identify resistance mechanisms that can be targeted, and turn them into new treatment options and new study arms within SPRINTR,” says Karin Welén, University of Gothenburg.
Data integration and AI are built into SPRINTR from the outset. The harmonized data can support the development and validation of AI models for areas such as digital pathology, spatial molecular analysis and modelling of disease progression.
Patients also consent to being contacted about future studies based on their molecular or clinical profile. This creates a nationwide study-ready population of patients who may be eligible for trials and could make participation more accessible, regardless of where in Sweden a patient receives care.
Three clinical studies are planned to start within the platform in 2027. Two will investigate biomarker-guided approaches for patients with localized prostate cancer at different levels of risk, while a third will evaluate a new medical device.
SPRINTR aims to develop a national sandbox within SciLifeLab’s AIDA Data Hub, where precision medicine tools such as AI-based digital pathology and molecular tumour board systems can be developed and tested on real patient data in a secure environment, before they are ready for clinical use. The aim is that the evidence generated in SPRINTR should not stay in research but be used in clinical guidelines, regulatory assessment and decisions on which new treatments and tools to introduce in healthcare. The same model is now being extended to pancreatic cancer.
The SPRINTR initiative has broad national representation through a steering group involving all Swedish university hospitals and medical faculties led by Andreas Josefsson, Umeå University, and Karin Welén, University of Gothenburg, with Carolina Wählby, Uppsala University, Joakim Lundeberg, KTH, and Lukas Orre, Karolinska Institutet and Clinical Proteomics at SciLifeLab, as integrated partners.
