Treatment and Therapies for Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer

Bladder cancer is the most common urinary malignancy responsible for cancer-deaths worldwide with approximately over 80,000 cases and over 17,000 deaths in 2019. There are two types of bladder cancer: non-muscle invasive tumors (NMIBC) accounting for 80% of all bladder cases, and muscle invasive tumors (MIBC) accounting for the remaining 20% of cases. Studies have found approximately 30% of bladder cancer invade bladder muscles and become MIBC, which have poor prognosis, survival rate and a higher probability of recurrence. Therefore, more studies are required to further our understanding of how treatment and therapies can improve prognosis and survival rate.

Radical cystectomy and pelvic lymph node dissection is considered the most common therapy for MIBC. Other therapies available are partial cystectomy, transurethral resection (TUR), single chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Studies have found that a trimodal therapy which includes TUR preceded by chemotherapy and radiation therapy has been the most effective towards the treatment of bladder cancer. Immunotherapy is a recent developing field in oncology and involves several immune checkpoints including programmed cell death 1 receptor (PD-1), PD-ligand-1 (PD-L1), and cytotoxic T lymphocyte-associated protein 4 (CTLA-4) which have been applied in MIBC and has received positive results. Thus far, the immune checkpoint inhibitors atezolizumab, pembrolizumab, nivolumab, durvalumab, and avelumab have been approved for improving the prognosis and survival time for MIBC patients.

There is continuous research in the field of treatments and therapies to improve the prognosis and overall survival rate of patients who suffer from muscle invasive bladder cancer. Topics of interest include:
-Radical cystectomy on muscle invasive bladder cancer
-Influence of chemotherapy on muscle invasive bladder cancer
-Influence of radiation therapy on muscle invasive bladder cancer
-Factors that affect non-muscle invasive bladder cancer to muscle-invasive bladder cancer
-Immunotherapy and immune checkpoint inhibitors in muscle invasive bladder cancer
-DNA methylation in muscle invasive bladder cancer

Please note: manuscripts consisting solely of bioinformatics or computational analysis of public genomic or transcriptomic databases which are not accompanied by validation (independent cohort or biological validation in vitro or in vivo) are out of scope for this section and will not be accepted as part of this Research Topic.