My dad had prostate cancer. So did my step-father. So do friends of mine. So when I came across Nanostics, an Edmonton company working on early detection for prostate cancer, I paid closer attention than I normally would. I wanted to like the page. I still went looking for what was wrong with it, because that’s what I’m doing here, but I went in rooting for them.
For the record, I have no relationship with Nanostics. Never worked with them, never pitched them, don’t know anyone there. Everything below comes from their public homepage and their own published research.
What they actually have
Here’s the situation their product exists to fix. A man gets a PSA test. It comes back high. The standard next step is a biopsy, which involves needles going somewhere no man wants needles going, and most of the time that biopsy finds nothing that needed finding.
Nanostics built a tool called ClarityDX Prostate that scores a man’s actual risk before anyone reaches for a needle. It runs blood markers and clinical inputs through a model and produces a risk score, and the doctor uses that score to decide whether the biopsy is worth doing.
The science is real and it’s published. Their April 2026 paper in npj Digital Medicine, which is part of the Nature family, reports that the models could cut unnecessary biopsies by up to 35% while still catching more than 94% of aggressive cancers. An earlier validation study ran on 3,448 patients.
That’s a genuinely good product with genuinely good evidence behind it.
What the homepage says
The headline is “We Bring Clarity to Healthcare Decisions.”
The line under it is “Improving outcomes starts with better screening decisions.”
Then: “Our AI-powered ClarityDX platform analyses clinical data to provide actionable decision support for next-step testing, including imaging or biopsy.”
Read those three lines again and notice what’s missing. Nobody has said prostate cancer yet. Nobody has said blood test. Nobody has said anything about avoiding unnecessary biopsies. Nobody has said the thing this company can do that almost nobody else can do.
The button under all of it says LEARN MORE, and it goes to the About Us page. So a man who just got a phone call about his PSA levels, who is standing in his kitchen googling what that means, lands on this page and the only thing it offers him is a company history. But he wouldn’t ever reach this page, because it doesn’t talk about what he’s searching for in the first place.
The best sentence on the page is halfway down it
Scroll past the hero and there’s a quote from Dr. John Lewis, the CEO. It’s a brief quote and most of it thanks collaborators and summarizes the science.
Then, at the very end, he says biopsies are “invasive, uncomfortable and carry some risk.”
There it is. That’s the sentence. That’s the one thing on the whole page that a frightened man would actually feel, and it’s sitting at the tail end of a thank-you note.
This happens constantly and it’s rarely a writing problem. Somebody in that company knows exactly what’s at stake for the patient. It shows up in the CEO’s quote because a founder talking off the cuff says the human thing without thinking about it. Then the homepage gets written by committee and the human thing doesn’t survive the meeting because it’s not product- or benefit- or feature-enough.
So who is this page for?
Here’s where it gets interesting, and here’s the actual diagnosis.
There are three groups who could plausibly be reading this homepage.
The patient. High PSA, scared, googling, wants to know if there’s a way out of the needle.
The doctor. Urologist or family physician, has to order the test, wants to know if it’s accurate enough to change what she does next.
The funders. Grant bodies, philanthropic partners, accelerators, health system decision makers.
Now count what’s on the page. There’s a wall of roughly eighteen partner and funder logos. The three news items are an academic ePoster, a story about philanthropy, and an award. The footer invites you to follow along to learn about “what’s in the developmental pipeline.”
The third audience is winning. By a mile. And the third audience isn’t buying anything.
I don’t think anyone decided this (or maybe they did?). I think this is what happens when a company grows out of a research lab and a hospital partnership, where for years the actual scoreboard was grants, publications, and institutional credibility. The page still reflects the room it was written in but not the room they need to be in to grow.
Two fears, two numbers, neither on the page
The patient and the doctor need the same test for completely different reasons, and Nanostics already has a number for each of them. Both come from the same paper (linked above).
Up to 32% fewer unnecessary biopsies. That’s the patient’s number. He’s afraid of the needle.
More than 94% of aggressive cancers still caught. That’s the doctor’s number. She’s afraid of the one she misses.
Neither figure appears anywhere on the homepage. They’re filed under Publications, one click away, where the scientific record lives and where nobody frightened goes because it’s science stuff.
That’s what’s frustrating about this page. The material is already written down and already peer-reviewed but isn’t anywhere a worried person would find it.
A few smaller things that add up
Partway down the page there’s a heading that reads “2024 Prostate cancer screening update.” It’s the summer of 2026. For a company whose entire pitch rests on scientific currency, a two-year-old date sitting on the homepage does quiet damage.
The blue callout section describes the test as “de-risking prostate cancer screening,” which is a phrase from a boardroom, not from a man worried about cancer.
And there’s a sentence with a word missing from it, which nobody caught.
None of these matter much on their own. Together they say something worth hearing, which is that nobody owns this page. There’s no single person whose job is to look at it and ask whether it’s doing anything for the people who land on it.
Where I’d point them
I’m not going to write their homepage for them, but I’ll say where I’d aim.
Open with hope. The very top of that page should speak to the man who just got the phone call, and it should tell him plainly that there might be a blood test that spares him the biopsy. Not clarity. Not decisions. Not screening outcomes. The needle he’s afraid of, and the possibility of avoiding it.
It should also speak to the doctor who has to make that call and be able to offer hope to the man on the other end hearing this for the first time and wondering if it means what he thinks it means.
Then give the doctor her own door, clearly marked, one scroll down. She needs different proof and a different tone, and she should not have to read past the patient’s material to get to it. Two audiences, two paths, one page. That part is solvable.
Move the numbers up. They earned those numbers over a decade and they belong where people can see them.
Then move the funder material down. It isn’t wrong to have it, and institutional credibility genuinely matters in diagnostics. It just shouldn’t be the loudest thing on a page where two other people arrived with a problem.
The part that applies to everyone else
Most companies don’t have a messaging problem. They have a message that got quieter every time it went through a review.
The version that gets published usually isn’t the best sentence anybody wrote. It’s the one nobody objected to – smooth enough to clear the room but vague enough that nobody outside the room feels anything when they read it.
The pattern is always the same. The real message exists but also doesn’t officially exist. It’s in a founder’s quote, or a customer testimonial, or the way a salesperson explains the product when nobody’s writing it down. Our job is to go find the most human sentence anyone at your company has said in public, and ask why it isn’t at the top of your homepage.
Nanostics, if you ever want to talk about this, I’d genuinely enjoy it. This one matters to me more than most.
