Advances in Diagnosis and Treatment of Non-Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer

Bladder cancer remains one of the most common malignancies globally with a high mortality rate and poor prognosis and survival rate. Non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC) which is heterogeneous, accounts for over 75% of bladder cancer cases and has a high recurrence rate. The standard management for NMIBC patients is primarily transurethral resection of bladder tumor (TURBT) which is then combined with postoperative individual intravesical chemotherapy. There are also immunotherapy treatment options for patients including the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG). Several newer approaches include combination intravesical chemotherapy and systemically administered check point inhibitor therapy as well as various types of gene therapy and immune response enhancing treatments. Some of these can be instilled intravesically. There have also been significant advances in enhancing diagnosis of early stage bladder cancer using a variety of protein based as well as gene expression based urinary markers. These markers can help rule out bladder cancer in those presenting with hematuria as well as identify patients with higher grade and more aggressive disease. Urine based marker panels have also been developed to predict patients who are more likely to BCG based immunotherapy.

The goal of this Research Topic is to explore the diagnostic and treatment opportunities for non-muscle invasive bladder cancer patients. We welcome Original Research, Reviews, Systematic Reviews, Mini-Reviews and Case Reports.

Topics of specific interested, but are not limited to:
-New diagnostic and prognostic markers for NMIBC

-Novel markers and tests which are predictive of BCG and other chemo/immunotherapy responses

-Management of BCG exposed as well as BCG unresponsive NMIBC

-Development for management of BCG naive intermediate risk NMIBC

-Novel delivery of intravesical therapy, systemic therapy and gene therapy for NMIBC

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.