In this episode, we explore how we’re reshaping the way we approach prostate cancer screening. We begin with Dr. Arnon Chait’s fascinating personal journey—from working as a physicist and rocket scientist at NASA to co-founding Cleveland Diagnostics. His transition from space science to biotechnology is rooted in a deeper mission: making medical diagnostics more effective, accessible, and less invasive.
Dr. Chait explains how he and his co-founder Boris Zaslavsky created Cleveland Diagnostics through a unique scientific and clinical collaboration. Their work led to the development of IsoPSA, a next-generation liquid biopsy test that significantly improves the accuracy of prostate cancer screening compared to the traditional PSA test. While PSA testing has been vital since the 1980s, it lacks specificity, often leading to unnecessary and painful biopsies. IsoPSA changes that by identifying whether the PSA comes from normal or cancerous cells, giving physicians better guidance for decision-making.
We reflect on the flaws in current screening guidelines, particularly the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force’s recommendations that limit PSA screening based on age, rather than overall health or family history. Both of us agree that this age cap contributes to preventable cases of advanced prostate cancer. The ability to stratify risk early—and cost-effectively—is essential for improving outcomes and reducing the financial and emotional burdens of over-treatment.
A major focus of our conversation is democratizing access to early detection. We discuss integrating IsoPSA into mobile men’s health clinics, allowing men in underserved areas to receive accurate results in real time from a single blood draw. IsoPSA’s affordability and compatibility with existing lab equipment make it ideal for broad implementation.
We also touch on the importance of public engagement and awareness campaigns like Cleveland Diagnostics' “PSA on PSA,” which aims to spread knowledge and encourage early testing. Yet, we recognize that stigma around men’s health persists. We call for more public figures and survivors to share their stories, helping to normalize conversations about prostate and testicular cancer.
We conclude with reflections on legacy, innovation, and the evolving role of AI in diagnostics. While AI has promise, we emphasize the importance of keeping diagnostics simple, interpretable, and actionable for real-world clinical settings.
Dr. Michael Lutz (00:07):
Welcome to On Call for Men's Health Podcast, and I'm Dr. Michael Lutz.
This is where we talk about things you don't want to talk about, but these are conversations that could save your life or the lives of the men you love, and thank you for joining us.
Today, we're going to talk about prostate cancer screening and changing the paradigm of care. And our guest today is Dr. Arnon Chait from Cleveland Diagnostics. Arnon, thank you for being here with us.
Dr. Arnon Chait (00:36):
My pleasure.
Dr. Michael Lutz (00:37):
This is a really great opportunity, this is something very different than we've ever done before because we're actually going to talk about a product that's being used all over the world to screen for prostate cancer and how we can change the paradigm and get more men screened more effectively and with less financial burden and personal toxicities, and that’s why I’m really excited to have Arnon here today.
Your story is quite a story, and I think I'd really like to talk about you first. You were born in Israel; you trained and got educated at Ohio State University. Unfortunately, I went to Michigan, so-
Dr. Arnon Chait (01:11):
I know.
Dr. Michael Lutz (01:12):
You had the days of Woody Hayes, and I was at Bo Schembechler, so we have a little bit of rivalry here. But I think what really stuck out in my brain when I read a little bit about your biography is that you worked at NASA. So, you're really a rocket scientist, aren't you?
Dr. Arnon Chait (01:28):
Actually, I had a T-shirt that says, “Well, yes I am a rocket scientist” that my daughter bought for me, but I wanted to correct one thing right off the bat. When a physician, when an MD, calls the other guy “doctor,” we are not. We are really just philosophers. We have PhDs, I'm a physicist really by training, but you're absolutely right, I was a rocket scientist.
Dr. Michael Lutz (01:50):
I also noticed that you started at NASA around 1986. That was my last year of residency but the one thing I remember vividly was early in the morning watching the Challenger crash.
Dr. Arnon Chait (02:04):
Me too.
Dr. Michael Lutz (02:05):
It actually chokes me up a little bit. How did that impact your career at NASA at least in the beginning?
Dr. Arnon Chait (02:13):
So, when I joined NASA, you're right, it was right after the Challenger, and that was certainly a shock not only for the system but for the country and the whole world as I remember. But I joined the part of NASA that flies space experiments.
Think of it as sandbox of the highest level. We ran experiments in almost every physical field that I could name, and I learned a lot about anywhere from semiconductors to protein crystallization, to all kinds of topics. Actually, I joined the part of NASA — once you receive a PhD, either you go to academia or you go to work for some companies.
And I know, at the time, even the quants were starting on Wall Street and my background is more in applied mathematics, physics, and I almost was recruited to Wall Street, but I decided that it's just not sufficiently interesting. Money by itself doesn't have the extra oomph that you need in life.
Dr. Michael Lutz (03:12):
There's a rumor that you actually got a number of patents while you were there. Are there any of the patents that you can actually share with us that were fascinating for all of us?
Dr. Arnon Chait (03:19):
Yeah, because again, as a scientist I pretty much wrote my own ticket. And once you reach certain level of science at NASA, they let you do what you want or they used to at least.
So, it was a wonderful place to work. But the ones that I think that we will still visit in the future, is a set of patents on nuclear fusion actually, how to power a long-term spacecraft that goes all the way out from far away from the sun, and it cannot get solar power anymore.
Dr. Michael Lutz (03:48):
Well, fortunate for all of us, you've actually translated all of that smart educational material from the space industry into prostate cancer screening at Cleveland Diagnostics. Can you tell me a little bit about what makes Cleveland Diagnostics so unique?
Dr. Arnon Chait (04:04):
It's actually a joint venture, which I think that most biotech companies should learn that lesson early on. You may have a good idea, and we did. My co-founder Boris Zaslavsky, who is also a Russian immigrant with kind of an unusual educational background, more in biophysics, if you think about it.
Cleveland Diagnostics is essentially a joint venture between technology that Boris, my co-founder, who I met through a book that he wrote when I was doing a sabbatical at Tufts, that's what you could do also at NASA, you can do a lot of things.
So, I was dabbling into teaching potentially, and I read his book. He just came off the boat and wrote a book about all his ideas, and we started talking, and he came and spent time in my basement and we put together a company and developed this technology that is based on some early ideas that he had.
But then when we moved to medical diagnostics, which we didn't know too much about — we did it initially with Martin Resnick, as you probably know, was the ex-president of the American Neurological Association at the time and he was at University Hospital who directed the initial trust of what we did because we didn't know where the technology could be applicable.
And then later on, when Mark Stovsky (who is today our chief medical officer) joined in, he was a young physician with an interest in diagnostics, the direction became much clearer. And when he moved to Cleveland Clinic, he instigated this collaboration between our technology and Cleveland Clinic as a preeminent clinical research institution in the country.
The little quick lesson behind all of that is, especially for young biotech companies, that you cannot do it alone. And the best collaboration that you can have is not so much with money, but with expertise and with directions that could be had by directly working with your customers from ground zero, which is really the urologist, and nothing better than this joint venture.
Dr. Michael Lutz (06:06):
I just was kind of curious, prostate cancer is really prevalent, and I just wanted to know how has prostate cancer affected you as far as within your family, and how has that affected your mission and your goal to actually do something as inventive and as important as what you're doing right now?
Dr. Arnon Chait (06:23):
So, men are lucky because (and we'll talk about it) we have this one little three-character word, PSA- prostate-specific antigen- that no organ in the body has. Namely, the ability to look at the prostate indirectly and ask the question, “Is there anything wrong?” And again, we'll discuss in a moment, but going back to your question, cancer obviously is ubiquitous, either we touched it or one of our family members touched it.
In my case, it's my grandfather, and my father had a benign condition, and I know that there would be a time if I live long enough that I'll also have something because it's just a matter of time. The question is being able to analyze it and figure it out earlier on. Like anything else in cancer, earlier on gives the physician a huge range of opportunities to deal with it, and that's really the essence of the conversation.
Dr. Michael Lutz (07:19):
I don't think a lot of people know this; PSA or prostate-specific antigen really hasn't been around for that long. We're going back, it was discovered in 1979 and clinically in the mid-1980s, which was the beginning of my practice. And in fact, in the state of Michigan, there were only three urologists who were using PSA for screening for prostate cancer, just three of us, and now it's ubiquitous.
But interestingly, you have a spin on this. You have a product now called IsoPSA, which is very different from traditional PSAs. So, how is this a different test? What makes this different?
Dr. Arnon Chait (07:55):
Maybe we'll roll back; the question is what is PSA and how can you even use it in order to say something about the organ that we're talking about, which is the prostate?
As I said before, we're damn lucky as men to have that because there's no other cancer, especially as prevalent as prostate cancer, which is the number two cancer in men, that allows you to ask questions very simply and very inexpensively, just with a simple blood test that you can do once a year, and create such wealth of information out of the answer.
But the wealth of information actually with the hands of a physician could tell a man that something is wrong, but it doesn't mean that it's necessarily cancer, and it doesn't mean that it's actually cancer that you want to deal with aggressively.
Namely, it simply points to the fact that you have something, but then you enter something that it's called (in the field, I guess, I learned) the diagnostic workup, which is to say that once you have abnormal PSA, which tells the urologist that something is wrong, it doesn't mean that you have cancer, but you enter basically a range or a progression of tests that are becoming more and more invasive as they go in because you have to get to the tissue itself sometimes.
But in order for us to make the best use of PSA and recommend it for everybody all the time, every year … I'm sure you have patients that you used to give it every six months or every three months even because you’re asking different questions from PSA.
In order to make use of it, you need something after PSA that says this particular man, even though he has abnormal PSA, nevertheless, that one is probably benign. Something that I can monitor over time and it's never going to develop to be a big problem, or maybe that man definitely needs a biopsy today.
So, it allows you, as a urologist, and I'm talking about one of the people, the first physicians who ever used our test actually, is it allows you to … you are a busy man, you have always people who wait three months in line with abnormal PSA before they can see you. And we don't have many urologists around this country.
So, to make best use of your time, you need a set of your toolbox that allow you to ask who is at risk, and then is this risk real and that's where IsoPSA, the test that we develop, comes to play.
Dr. Michael Lutz (10:22):
Well, that was always one of my concerns early on as a urologist, is that there was this knee jerk reflux that if you had an elevated PSA, you needed a biopsy. And as a result of that, we did a lot of biopsies, and a lot of them came back negative.
And we were very fortunate for organizations like Cleveland Diagnostics developing these liquid biopsy tests, these intermediary tools that can help discern more accurately who needs a biopsy and who doesn't.
Now, since that time, we've been able to add in MRIs as an additional screening tool. But now that we have all these better tools, this is where I think the issue of the guidelines, the U.S. Preventative Services has for guidelines, have been something that have caused us much angst and can be modified in such a way to not be such a problem.
How do you think the guidelines have impacted some of your decision-making in the role of IsoPSA?
Dr. Arnon Chait (11:19):
So, for the listener, again, the guidelines are referred to, the task force is a body of physicians (usually PCPs as far as I know, please correct me) who recommend many procedures, but especially early screening and detection technologies.
For example, they recommended initially, I think in early 2010 maybe or ‘11, that maybe many women could skip mammograms. Of course, women immediately raised hell, and every woman that I know in spite of the same issues that parallel PSA, namely lack of cancer specificity, still take it, and I recommend it to every person that I know.
Then they came to men and simply said to the primary care physicians, let's not give most men, unless they have some other reasons like family or whatever, let's not give them automatically PSA. Maybe they don't need it because it causes so many false positives, namely people who have maybe benign conditions or early-stage cancer that stays like that and does not need anything. In short, there's no benefit that led out of PSA, which is we know statistically is wrong.
And the first article that came out of it I remember was in the New York Times, I think in 2016 that said that there is a rise in late-stage prostate cancer, which means death, because of that. And you don't need to be a statistician to understand. You walk down the street, you ask somebody, “Do you want to get early cancer or late-stage cancer?” And they will know the answer.
The question was correctly though, there are many false positives, and that's exactly your question. If we can now go back to the task force and say, “Hey, we have simple tests that allow us to stratify who really needs these biopsies that you're so complaining about, then you should recommend it for everybody.”
And just last night, I sent a quick email to a friend, simply said, “Well, 40-year-old, blah, blah, blah, but they have in the family history,” and this is somebody from our group. And I said, “Absolutely. Take PSA immediately.” 40-years-old with family history, I don't need to be a physician. Physicians would know what to do with the information, but you take the test, don't listen to your PCP.
Dr. Michael Lutz (13:30):
It really saddens me that the guidelines have chronological ages. And what I mean by that is they cap out at 70-years-of age, and there's not one guideline that encourages men who have 10 years of survivorship to go ahead and get screened. And we would've never been faced with the issue that Joe Biden was faced with if we didn't cap out at 70 years of age.
And we looked at really the overall survival of men, look at their fit. Don't look at their chronologic age, but look at their physiologic age because we shouldn't be facing every year 15.000 to 30,000 men being diagnosed with late stage or metastatic prostate cancer, which is incurable.
Dr. Arnon Chait (14:09):
Yeah, and as a country, even if you want to talk about it as a business because after all, every disease is a business, you are then writing down a treatment that is in the tens of thousands per application for indication, and probably it's going to be a quarter million disease for the healthcare system, rather than treat it much earlier stage with much less side effects.
And by the way, the patients may live or probably would live in early detection, but late-stage cancer is fundamentally an incurable disease. It doesn't matter how you think of it. Some people always get cured, but some people statistically also walk down the street without any car hitting them.
So, it's meaningless to say that the most important thing is everybody recognized that the healthcare system should work on early-stage disease in general. With that sense, we both agree even that Kennedy is right, even though his approach of course is Kennedy, you know (laughs).
Dr. Michael Lutz (15:06):
Right. So, IsoPSA, the test that you've developed and implemented is considered a liquid biopsy test. This area over the past 10 years has become incredibly crowded, and is even going to become even more crowded because of the value, the incredible value of this tool. How do you think the IsoPSA test actually stands out?
Dr. Arnon Chait (15:28):
That's a great question. It's a bit technical, so I'll try to make it simpler. When you talk about liquid biopsy, typically, in our field, people refer to something that's called DNA sequencing. So, you look at little pieces of DNA that are always circulating in your blood and you ask whether this piece come from a cancer cell or not.
And because the cancer cells typically have mutations in their DNA, so that's the typical liquid biopsy. But remember the basic biology says DNA actually is just a telephone book. It just codes for something else. It doesn't ring; it's not a telephone. The telephone rings, the telephone is the protein.
So, PSA is a protein, for example, and it is coming only from the prostate that's why we are lucky, man. You measure PSA and it costs you $3 versus $3,000 (that's by the way the cost of a liquid biopsy typically so you cannot do too many of them). But you can ask the $3 question or $20 by the time everybody adds all the prices. But you can ask the $20 question every year or every three months.
Proteins are the business end of all diseases. So, if you ask a question about the protein, you're asking a question about the disease. The thing that we do uniquely is ask the right question. Namely, did you come … hey, PSA, instead of asking how much PSA exists in the blood, we would ask, “Where did you come from?”
And our technology allows us to simply detect the quantity of PSA that comes from cancer cell if there is any versus the one that comes from normal because the prostate would always make PSA, so that's its job actually.
So, again, the simplicity, the accessibility, the fact that it's minimally invasive and it's affordable to the healthcare system and to the patient so we can keep on asking the right question again and again.
Dr. Michael Lutz (17:28):
Well, and not only is the liquid biopsy test more cost-effective, but it's also less invasive. It saves a patient from having a potentially unnecessary biopsy, and also finding out that they don't have a diagnosis of prostate cancer.
You can save up to 50% or greater number of biopsies that men would have to have in order to make a diagnosis or not make a diagnosis. And so, that's a large number of men who are slowly being tortured. And I can tell you that most men would tell you they'd rather avoid the biopsy in any way possible, they'd pay anything to have a blood test that would save them a biopsy.
Dr. Arnon Chait (18:04):
Perhaps, we're kind enough not to mention that the biopsy itself is typically through a template that involves about 12 needles at the wrong part of your body. Of course, it's not without other dangers. Even the MRI, so called MRI-guided biopsy, which is the latest and greatest, it still has a lot of false positives and false negatives.
It is really good to just have a simple blood test that we already — we did not, but other people who have used our test, including yourself, wrote publications about how it actually works in the real world or in tandem with MRI and such, and how is it to answer question for years rather than only do you have a cancer now?
But for example, if IsoPSA comes below the cutoff level, that gives comfort to the physicians over … if the data, I think goes back to at least three years, you probably are not going to have high grade prostate cancer.
So, that kind of allows physicians to work with the patients to schedule the next follow up, and this is how you manage healthcare effectively, this is what physician wants to do instead of just drill the wrong patients, as we used to say here.
Dr. Michael Lutz (19:17):
Well, I'm a total fan of these tests because I believe that they're one of the biggest revolutions in prostate cancer screening and is the basis for the reason why the guidelines need to be changed, and we need to get more men screened.
One of our missions in our foundation is to develop a mobile men's health clinic to screen all men throughout the state of Michigan. And one of my desires is to employ a liquid biopsy test such as an IsoPSA as the first step in the process so that we can eliminate unnecessary testing within the community and democratize the prostate cancer screening process, and I believe that this is a real opportunity.
Looking at financial toxicity is so crucial, and is so really just under thought about within the community, and that is really what we believe we can do. And I want to know what do you see as the future of the role of IsoPSA, and not just for screening, but also for its applications in prostate cancer?
Dr. Arnon Chait (20:19):
I love the word democratized by the way, immediately, not only because the current political implications, but you are absolutely right, that the context of this is accessible to everybody where it can help and available to everybody regardless of who you are.
And I think that this is a great idea, and I'll tell you from our perspective because you started up. So, you'll give PSA, and you'll ask people potentially for other questions and maybe other physical exams, all of which are very simple, very quick, and can stratify patients.
So, if in that lab, for example, if you can conduct the PSA test, which is very easy to do, I mean this is automated systems that could run in the back of a van as far as I'm concerned, I'm looking at one right now in the lab.
The beauty about it is if PSA comes high, you don't have to call the patients again. You can take the same blood test, the same blood tube that you had, already taken from the patient and you can run IsoPSA, and IsoPSA runs on the same machine with another little step.
So, you'll be able to, in half an hour or so that the patient is involved with you to actually answer the first questions, are you at risk? And if you are at risk, is it something that you should be concerned about as in cancer? Which is a big, huge … you are already coupled at least two or three appointments into one right then and there in the back of your van, which is amazing.
Dr. Michael Lutz (21:47):
That's fantastic.
Dr. Arnon Chait (21:49):
Yeah. Let's collaborate on this one, I'm serious.
Dr. Michael Lutz (21:52):
I agree, this is something that needs to be done. And you are very proactive in the community as well. In fact, this is your third annual “PSA on PSA” campaign. Can you talk a little bit about what that campaign really means?
Dr. Arnon Chait (22:07):
So, if you think about it, PSA on PSA is a cute name if you think about it. But the first PSA is really Public Service Announcement. So, it just happened to be that we could be cute, but we can also be effective. So, PSA on PSA is nothing more than an awareness service that we simply said, how we can make the biggest difference. It has nothing to do with IsoPSA directly of course.
I mean, yeah, I mean we think that IsoPSA could help again in this diagnostics workup, which we discussed. But the most important piece is for everybody to make a pledge (and that's what it does) to introduce somebody, themselves or their family members or Joe down the street to the idea that they need to be screened. So, the pledge is to talk to your doctor if it's yourself or somebody else to pledge, to encourage somebody to care about or to pledge to help spread their awareness, and that's all.
And what we do is aside from a little website and what goes on in it and spreading the word — I mean, we are going to send the psaonpsa.org to just about everybody that we know and I want every listener to do the same, is we actually are going to have financial contribution. It's going to be doubled, and it's going to go to a significant foundation in our space, which is called the ZERO Prostate Cancer Foundation. So, it's going to be doubled, and you'll do some good and potentially, you'll save lives.
I know before we started actually, I told you that among other things in life, you should go and count how many lives you influenced and how many lives you saved yourself as a physician; you're lucky. And one of the things that is now your passion is to continue with this, and I think this is great.
So, it's not us. We develop technology, but if people like you do not push it forward and you talked about how it should influence the task force to change its mind and all that, we haven't done our work. So, this is part of PSA on PSA.
Dr. Michael Lutz (24:13):
For 18 years, our foundation has reached into the community to try and change the philosophies and concepts and educate and engage men. Do you think there's a certain message that can truly break through?
Dr. Arnon Chait (24:28):
The one thing that always was curious to me is why is it so difficult to discuss prostate, for example, let's call it, versus your pancreas, versus … maybe it goes to the Puritan upbringing of this country. I came from Israel, and we are just kind of agnostics.
As far as I’m concerned, you can talk about my skin, which I go to my dermatologist every six months to make sure that I don't get melanoma, and I would go to my urologist once if I see my PSA rises. Fundamentally, I have truly a hole in that, and I wish I had a really good answer for that. I don’t know, what do you think?
Dr. Michael Lutz (25:08):
It's interesting, we had a campaign called “Got Nuts? Check ‘Em,” that we did during Testicular Cancer Awareness month, which is April. And we would have it placed on the back of beer trucks throughout the state of Michigan.
Dr. Arnon Chait (25:20):
Oh, great.
Dr. Michael Lutz (25:21):
Just to share a message. And believe it or not, the company that hosted our signage on their truck said they never got more phone calls in one month than ever. And I said, “Well, that's great.” And they said, “Well, not really. They weren't friendly phone calls. They were people that were upset that something of that nature would be placed on the back of a truck.”
So, interestingly, our society is still not ready, it's still not engaged to the point where they want to talk about testicular cancer in a public forum, and I believe that prostate cancer is just right behind it. So, we have to try and find another way to get the message out there.
And so, that's why I'm curious as to what the message is, and do we need maybe a messenger as well, someone who's a prostate cancer survivor that can actually share their story that people then take to heart?
We've had many survivors, but the problem is that many men once diagnosed with prostate cancer, go back into their closets and wear it in private. They don't share their story in public, and so we need more people to share their message.
Dr. Arnon Chait (26:23):
And perhaps even some of the ones that we all know and we all love, and I'm not talking about the Cal Ripken or the Al Roker or whatever, because it's so prevalent. It's like we all know people who had it.
So, I'll tell you what, offline, you started having the gears running, but of course, your experience nowadays as a messenger of this mission gives you many more tools, but I'm going to think about it separately as well.
Is there a way that you can almost create kind of a tsunami? Because testicular cancer affects mostly younger men. So, yeah, I mean, like you go to the college dorm and you put nuts on, what is it? How did you say it?
Dr. Michael Lutz (27:03):
“Got nuts? Check ‘em.”
Dr. Arnon Chait (27:05):
“Got nuts? Check them,” which is great. So, they would smile, and they'll do it potentially, X percentage of them. But I think that most older men kind of lose inhibitions a little bit because we live long enough, it's all we know, we are not tied up to this anymore. Maybe we are easier to deal with than the other guys, the younger guys. But again, let's take that offline, I think that this is a great discussion point.
Dr. Michael Lutz (27:33):
Well, I want to take advantage of your scientific genius here for a moment. What do you think will be the eventual role of AI playing in the screening space?
Dr. Arnon Chait (27:43):
AI is excellent at some things. For example, the LLM, the large learning models obviously. So, they're extremely good from data processing perspective and understanding, they're also extremely good at understanding images. So, again, as you said, a big part of medicine is looking through your body with either X-ray or MRI or whatever.
By the way, there is a misnomer that physicians actually are as responsible as anybody else. Physicians are in love with pictures and because they're useful, no question about it. But people forgot that X-ray is nothing more than a flashlight through your body, through a tissue, and you're really looking at change in morphology, like little dots that absorb X-ray differently (I'm a physicist, sorry).
Or MRI: MRI produces pictures that are in color, so people believe them more. But reality is that these two are not connected to cancer, they're just correlated to cancer by shape, by other things that pathologists and radiologists learn how to figure out.
But AI could do an excellent job at either … it's actually a very controversial statement because people compare radiologists for example to AI who reads the same images, and they found that they're at least as good, et cetera, et cetera.
But that's not correct to do because physicians also eventually make decisions, and it's going to be very hard to convince me personally to have a machine decide that I'm at low risk, and therefore, a radiologist doesn't need to look at me, for example. I don't care about all the rest. And I'm a physicist and I definitely love AI and understand all of those.
Going back to again, for example, who is at risk. So, a long time ago when it was just before AI, but machine learning was already kind of in front of it, I was talking to a company in Israel that started out by an interesting fellow who made a lot of money on Wall Street doing AI on Wall Street. He made like hundreds of millions. He had also prostate cancer in the family and all that.
So, he started a little company that got all the medical records from the largest healthcare provider in Israel at the time, it was like over 3 million. And he said, “I'll read the entire medical record, I'll feed it to my computer, and it's going to tell me who is potentially is going to get prostate cancer independently of PSA.”
And guess what, it flopped, because many, many reasons obviously, but biology is a curious little bugger. And I kind of learned early on that the less questions I ask biology, the better the answer would be. Simpler is better with biology. And our test is designed like that. We ask one question about one protein, but it is directly related to your prostate, and we know the science is directly related to the disease.
So, I don't have to do what machine learning or AI does, which is I need billions of data points in order to do some black box that nobody understands. I'm asking something and giving information in the terms of a cutoff, you use the test yourself. So, it's easily interpretable by a physician because they don't have two hours to explain to their patients or to understand themselves.
And that's really actually the issue with a lot of the genetic information that is flowing to physicians today, because most of the genes are related but nobody knows exactly what to do with them. But we simply say, “This patient is low risk, this patient is high risk,” physician and the patients in a shared decision model figure out what to do next, and it's super simple and effective.
Dr. Michael Lutz (31:21):
Well, Arnon, you've made so many contributions to science, and I just was kind of curious, what do you believe is your greatest success?
Dr. Arnon Chait (31:29):
You ask hard questions, you know that, Michael? Yeah, I don't know if I have really greater success. Well, okay, maybe I will take one credit, sort of. I have a lot of interests and the interests kind of change every dozen years or so. So, after a while, you kind of learn how to ask the right questions, and also to steer things that would eventually become real things that help people maybe perhaps better than other people.
So, if my contribution is to just enable effective things, whether they're in … I don’t know, will eventually have a nuclear fusion under my name or IsoPSA certainly is there, or there are other cancers that use the same technologies and same ideas that we have in a company that would also benefit the same approach of simplicity, adaptability and low cost in the lab, and the ability to help physician make earlier decisions.
Dr. Michael Lutz (32:31):
Well, in that same vein, how would you like to be remembered?
Dr. Arnon Chait (32:37):
Oof, actually, I'm not ready for this question yet.
Dr. Michael Lutz (32:40):
I'm sorry.
Dr. Arnon Chait (32:40):
I mean (laughs), Michael, I didn’t ask you that, you're also a young man. I'll say differently. Since you worked with a lot of men with advanced age and I'm a man at advanced age maybe, let's agree that we are not ready to answer any of these questions.
I can tell you what you have done in your life because I'm quite familiar now, but I can tell you I changed my mind about what I do too often to be of any sustained value to anybody as my daughter reminds me. Why don't you stick with something and just stay with it for 30 years? I said, nope.
[Music Playing]
Dr. Michael Lutz (33:18):
Well, I just want to take a moment to say thanks to Dr. Arnon Chait for a great conversation. And thank you for joining us, I'm Dr. Michael Lutz, a urologist and founder of the Michigan Men's Health Foundation.
And it's through our events, resources, and this podcast that we're dedicated to men's health advocacy and awareness. We're focused on education, research, and treatment of prostate cancer and men's health-related issues. And for more information about the work that we do and how you can get involved, visit us online at www.michiganmenshealthfoundation.org.
Dr. Arnon Chait (33:50):
And it's been my pleasure.