As reported on Inside Precision Medicine, Researchers at Stanford have created a new urine test that helps doctors understand how well bladder cancer treatments are working. Usually, bladder cancer is treated with surgery. If the cancer is high-risk, doctors also use a special treatment called BCG immunotherapy to help the body fight off any remaining cancer cells.
The problem is that it has always been hard to tell if the surgery was enough or if the patient actually needed the extra BCG treatment. To make things more confusing, as people get older, their bodies naturally develop small genetic changes that aren’t cancer, but older tests often mistook them for the disease. This is called the “field effect.”
This new test is much more accurate because it can tell the difference between normal aging and actual cancer. By looking at the DNA in a patient’s urine, the test puts patients into three groups:
- People who were cured by surgery alone.
- People who needed the BCG treatment to get rid of the cancer.
- People who did not respond to either treatment and need a more aggressive therapy.
This test is a game-changer because it can find tiny amounts of cancer that a doctor might miss during a regular physical exam. It also helps save medicine for the people who truly need it, which is important because there has been a shortage of BCG drugs for years.
Key Quotes from the Study
- “Our test can detect minimal residual disease non-invasively after bladder cancer treatment, while accounting for mutations present in normal urothelium that have complicated prior studies.”
- “For the first time, we were able to distinguish patients likely cured by [immunotherapy] from those cured by surgery.”
- “By correcting for the field effect, a known confounder of mutation-based bladder cancer detection, we improved the specificity of urine tumor DNA liquid biopsies.”
- “The ability to distinguish responders from non-responders to the two treatments also allowed us to study which molecular properties make tumors more likely to benefit from each therapy.”
