Currently, men over 50 can request a PSA test, which looks for abnormally high levels of protein in the blood, but this is unreliable, picking up many prostate cancers that would never need treatment, and missing others that do.
The trial will also use spit tests, which extract DNA from saliva, to see if this is more accurate than PSA readings.
Matthew Hobbs, director of research at Prostate Cancer UK, said current diagnostics methods don’t find enough aggressive cancers, and cause too much harm.
“We hear from men who were diagnosed late, whose lives may have been saved if they’d been screened or tested earlier. We also hear from a lot of men who have suffered incontinence or impotence because of treatments they had,” said Mr Hobbs.
“Some of those men didn’t need to have those treatments, and that’s the harm that we need to try to avoid.”