Secure WhatsApp recruitment system built to reach Black men in prostate cancer research

Researchers at Cardiff University have built and tested a secure, WhatsApp-based digital recruitment system designed to share prostate cancer risk information with Black men in southeast Wales, and a new paper published in Frontiers in Digital Health on 28 October 2026 describes in detail how the system was engineered, governed and protected. In the study, the term Black men refers specifically to men of Somali and African Caribbean heritage, two communities whose members face a markedly elevated burden of prostate cancer yet remain persistently underrepresented in research on the disease. The work is a methodological paper: it reports how a community-engaged pilot study was run safely, rather than presenting clinical outcomes. The clinical backdrop is stark. Prostate cancer is a frequently occurring cancer and a leading cause of cancer-related death in men, and while it is common in men over 70, black men and men with a family history carry the highest risk of all men. The reasons for the increased incidence in black men remain unclear, although recent evidence suggests that, compared with other ethnicities, black men without prostate cancer have higher levels of prostate-specific antigen, a protein secreted by the prostate that can indicate prostate disease, whether benign
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