Personalized medicine in advanced urothelial cancer: when to treat, how to treat and who to treat

Abstract

The past decade has provided an improved understanding of themolecular mechanism of bladder cancer by defining distinct pathwaysin tumorigenesis and progression. Advances in technologies,such as high-throughput transcript profiling, microarrays andproteomics, offer a systematic approach to identifying targets forbladder cancer diagnostics and drug discovery. This review presentsa select outline of the advances in the development of biomarkersand targets for patient prognosis and therapy selection.This paper describes a representative cohort of recent studies thathave the potential to significantly impact the management of muscleinvasive and metastatic urothelial carcinoma of the bladder.Space constraints do not permit this review to be comprehensiveand we apologize to the authors whose work we do not cite.