Liang Cheng, Director of Anatomic and Molecular Pathology at Brown Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, shared on LinkedIn:
“Great work led by Professor Zhang and colleagues, now published online in NPJ Precision Oncology Nature. Honored to be part of this collaborative work.
We review the rapidly evolving landscape of urinary biomarkers and liquid biopsies and their potential to transform the clinical management of bladder cancer.
As the field moves beyond conventional cytology and protein assays, RNA panels, DNA mutation and methylation assays, urinary tumor DNA, extracellular vesicles, and emerging multiplex and multi-omic platforms are creating new opportunities for precision-guided care.
These approaches may:
- Improve hematuria triage
- Detect recurrence and minimal residual disease
- Predict treatment response
- Enable more personalized surveillance.
High-negative-predictive-value assays may also help safely reduce the burden of repeated cystoscopy in appropriately selected patients while maintaining oncologic vigilance.
The major challenge is now translation into clinical practice. This will require standardized urine collection and processing, reproducible assays, clinically meaningful decision thresholds, prospective biomarker-guided trials, and demonstration of cost-effectiveness.
Looking ahead, the integration of genomic liquid biopsy, extracellular vesicles, multi-omics, and AI may provide a ‘molecular safety net’ for more precise, less invasive, and patient-centered bladder cancer management.”
Title: Urinary biomarkers in non-muscle invasive bladder cancer: translating multiplex and genomic liquid biopsies into clinical practice
Authors: Yuanyuan Zhang, Colton Walker, Adham Bassen, Tracy Criswell, Navid Jabalameli, Michael Patrick Feloney, Liang Cheng, Anthony Atala, Soroush Rais-Bahrami
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