Volume 15 Issue 6, June 2018

Prostate MRI has reached the point of being a mature technology with an established clinical need, so the modality is here to stay. Accordingly, it is incumbent upon the radiology community to find practical solutions for the ongoing variability in interpretation and diagnostic performance of this technique.

Bladder cancer molecular subtypes are promising for predicting patient outcomes. In contrast to most reports to date that used unsupervised clustering methods, a new study has demonstrated the value of a tumour differentiation signature based on normal biological expression patterns characteristic of basal or differentiated urothelial cells.

Refers to Mo, Q. et al. Prognostic power of a tumour differentiation gene signature for bladder urothelial carcinomas. J. Natl Cancer Inst. https://doi.org/10.1093/jnci/djx243 (2018)

The FDA recently approved the second-generation antiandrogen apalutamide for the treatment of men with nonmetastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer on the basis of metastasis-free survival data from the SPARTAN trial. However, whether apalutamide is clinically superior to enzalutamide and whether early or late treatment is preferable remains to be defined.

The Notch pathway has been shown to act in both an oncogenic and a tumour-suppressive manner depending on its cellular context, and blocking or restoring the Notch pathway could offer a novel therapeutic target in patients with bladder cancer. In this Review, the authors describe what is known about Notch in cancer and discuss the role and potential of this signalling pathway in bladder cancer.

The biology of masculinization is important for understanding embryonic developmental processes involved in the development of the male reproductive tract, genitalia and tumorigenesis of prostate cancer. In this Review, the authors describe our current understanding of the regulation of masculinization.

Male infertility is a multifactorial pathological condition, and its genetic landscape is highly complex. Here, Krausz and Riera-Escamilla describe our current understanding of the genetics of male infertility and the clinical implications of this knowledge.

In this Perspectives, the authors present a new model of urothelial carcinogenesis that incorporates the role of telomerase activation. They also highlight the potential of targeting telomerase as a therapeutic approach for bladder cancer.