Scientists at UC San Francisco have found a way to identify and possibly treat a mysterious type of bladder cancer that affects up to 1 in 4 cases.
First, they found a marker on the surface of the tumor cells that until now had only been associated with ovarian cancer; then they designed CAR-T therapy to kill the tumors in mice.
The discovery, which was made possible through funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), appears June 17 in Nature Communications .
"Unlike conventional bladder cancer, which has a consistent look under the microscope and succumbs predictably to therapy, the deadliest bladder tumors, collectively known as histologic variant (HV) bladder cancer, each look very different and can only be effectively treated with surgery," said Sima Porten , MD, an associate professor of urology at UCSF and co-senior author of the paper.
Far too often, however, these tumors grow back.
Using a sequencing technology developed in-house, the researchers analyzed gene expression in single cells in conventional and HV bladder tumors from patients at UCSF. They found that most HV tumors, regardless of subtype, had cells that expressed CA125, which is associated with ovarian cancer. Conventional bladder tumors did not have these cells.
