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The da Vinci surgical system
The da Vinci surgical system is a sophisticated robotic platform designed to expand the surgeon's capabilities and offers state-of-the-art minimally invasive options for kidney and other major surgeries.
 
The surgeon sits at a control console, which senses the surgeon's hand movements and translates them electronically into scaled-down micro-movements to manipulate tiny instruments and a high resolution 3D camera at the surgical site inside the body. The system also detects and filters out any tremors in the surgeon's hand movements, so that they are not duplicated robotically.

Kidney cancer is the eighth most common cancer in the UK and in 2010 some 9,600 people were diagnosed with the disease. In Europe an estimated 73,000 people were diagnosed with kidney cancer and worldwide more than 273,000. The disease kills and the death toll is increasing. In 2010 in the UK 4,100 people died of kidney cancer, 31,300 in Europe and more than 116,000 worldwide. 

The majority of deaths from the disease could be avoided by early diagnosis: hence the importance of reporting "blood in your pee".  Other symptoms include needing to urinate often or suddenly, pain while urinating, pain below the ribs that doesn't go away and a lump in your stomach.
 
A nephretomy 
An established surgical therapy for kidney cancer is a nephretomy: the complete removal of the kidney. Usually, this involves making an incision between the lower ribs on the side of the tumour, removing the diseased organ, some surrounding tissue and often the lymph nodes close to the kidney to check if they contain any cancer cells. 

Although a major surgery, it is preferred by some surgeons who believe that it reduces the chances of the recurrence of the disease.  A person can live a completely normal life with just one kidney.
 
Takeaway
Given the growing incidence of late stage kidney cancer, the battle against the disease increasingly includes high-tech surgical therapies such as the da Vinci surgical system.   

The standard PSA test is imperfect 
In the UK there is currently no national screening programme for prostate cancer. However, in 2002 the Prostate Cancer Risk Management Programme was introduced in response to a demand for the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test among men worried about prostate cancer. The Programme provides information to men about the benefits and risks of the PSA test, which is available, free of charge, to men over 50.
 
PSA is a protein produced by normal cells in the prostate and also by prostate cancer cells. All men have a small amount of PSA in their blood and elevated PSA suggests prostate problems, but not necessarily prostate cancer.
 
The test is imperfect and is not good at detecting prostate cancer early. In some cases, it completely misses cancers while in others it reports cancer when it is not present. This can lead to some difficult choices for men.
 
A 2013 study in Radiation Oncology supports earlier findings and suggests that men over 70 are better avoiding the PSA test since men with high risk prostate cancer are more likely to die of causes other than the disease.
 
The imperfections in PSA testing led, in 2011, to the US changing its guidelines on prostate cancer screening to suggest that healthy men should not take the test because of the risk of over diagnosing. Despite efforts to improve the PSA test, it is still recognised as the best non invasive prostate cancer test available.
 
Some good news for sufferers  
A promising new therapy to treat prostate cancer is high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU). HIFU therapy is a treatment modality of ultrasound involving minimally invasive or non-invasive methods to accurately destroy tumours by effectively heating them while doing far less damage to surrounding tissue and avoiding significant side effects. 
 
A 2012 clinical study reported in The Lancet suggests that HIFU therapy offers prostate cancer patients a significantly better treatment option than traditional methods and can be completed in a matter of hours during an outpatient visit to a hospital.
 
Clinical HIFU procedures are typically performed in conjunction with an imaging procedure to enable treatment planning and targeting before applying the therapeutic levels of ultrasound energy. MRI guided Focused Ultrasound Surgery (MRgFUS) combines a HIFU beam that non-invasively heats and destroys targeted tissue with MRI scanning that visualizes a patient's anatomy and controls the treatment by continuously monitoring the tissue effect. 

Some other encouraging new therapies for prostate cancer
Recently, a new drug, enzalutamide (Xtandi), developed by the prestigious American prostate research centre in UCLA, has recently been licensed for use in the UK for patients with an advanced form of the disease and who have run out of treatment options.  
 
Also, there are some new FDA approved vaccines. One is sipuleucel-T (Provenge), which is designed to boost the body's immune response to the prostate cancer cells. Another is PROSTVAC-VF, which uses a genetically modified virus containing PSA to trigger a response in a patient's immune system to recognise and destroy cancer cells containing PSA.
 
Nutrition and Lifestyle
According to the World Health Organization, wealthy countries with the high meat and dairy consumption have the highest prostate cancer rates. This has encouraged scientists to examine foods and substances in them that may reduce the risk of prostate cancer.
 
Researchers suggest that lifestyle changes might affect the rate at which prostate cancer develops. One study reports that the level of PSA may be lowered by a vegan diet, regular exercise and yoga. Another suggests that a daily intake of flaxseed slows the rate at which prostate cancer cells multiply. Also, scientists suggest that lycopenes and isolflavones, found in tomatoes and soybeans respectively might help prevent prostate cancer.
 
Difficult choices for men
Given that patients decide about their treatment options and given that there are several treatment modalities for prostate cancer each with specific costs and risks; men diagnosed with prostate cancer face some difficult choices.
 
One challenge arises because genes linked to prostate cancer do not show which cancers are likely to remain within the prostate, which is normal for older men and which are more likely to grow and spread.
 
For example, researchers have found that the gene EZH2 is more frequent in advanced stages of prostate cancer, but this does not indicate how aggressive the cancer is. So, knowing of the genes presence does not help a patient make the important decision between immediate treatments or continued monitoring.