Bladder cancer

The diagnostics, treatment and five-year survival rates for bladder cancer are largely unchanged since the 1990s. Research into cancer genomics, risk factors and immune therapies could hold the key to progress against this malignant disease.

People with metastatic bladder cancer once faced meagre treatment options and a grim prognosis. But immunotherapy has started to yield results.

Bladder cancer is more deadly in women than in men. That needs to change, say James McKiernan and Denise Asafu-Adjei.

Once thought to be sterile, the bladder contains microbes that could influence the development and treatment of cancer.

What happens when a professor of theatre finds out she has bladder cancer? She writes a one-woman play about it, of course.

Mechele Leon, an associate professor of theatre at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, was diagnosed with bladder cancer in March 2016. After treatment, Leon was left with no bladder, a urostomy bag, and a story to tell — which became a one-woman play called Bladder Interrupted.

Researchers delving into the details of bladder cancer are finding a rich trove of genetic information.

How Egyptian men swapped one type of bladder cancer for another.

Many non-invasive approaches to detecting bladder cancer are showing promise — including smart toilets.

Tackling the challenges of genomics and studies of the immune system should help to create much-needed diagnostics and treatments.

Intravesical immunotherapy using BCG is the treatment approach for patients with high-risk and intermediate-risk non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC). However, recurrence and progression are a problem. In this Review, an expert group of authors from the International Bladder Cancer Group discuss the treatment options available after BCG failure and provide recommendations for optimal management of these patients.

Large-scale, next-generation sequencing collaborations have identified drivers and vulnerabilities of urothelial carcinoma. In this Review, the authors discuss the mutational landscape of urothelial carcinoma, including specific mutations in pathways and driver genes and describe how the next generation of therapies will be based on patient-specific targetable mutations observed in individual tumours.

In this Review, the authors describe the developing therapeutic landscape for patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer. In particular, the data supporting the use of neoadjuvant cisplatin-based chemotherapy as a standard of care, the potential impact of genomic profiling on treatment approaches, and the emerging importance of immunotherapy are discussed.

Urothelial bladder cancer is one of the most common, and most deadly, malignant diseases worldwide. This Primer summarizes the current epidemiological and outcome data of patients with this disease, as well as describing how new molecular subtyping strategies might improve patient care in the future.

This Review discusses recent advances in the molecular characterization of bladder cancer, which has provided insights into pathogenesis and subgroups of bladder cancers with different prognosis.

This Review surveys the available models of bladder cancer and discusses their advantages and limitations, making suggestions for their improvement.