Dr. Bellmunt on The Cancer Genome Atlas Project in Bladder Cancer

Joaquim Bellmunt, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School, director, Bladder Cancer Center, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, discusses The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project in bladder cancer.

During the 2018 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium, the final entire cohort of 412 tumors that TCGA gathered from patients with chemotherapy-naïve muscle invasive urothelial bladder cancer was reported. Bellmunt, a contributor to the study, says that the different genomic aspects of bladder cancer were analyzed such as DNA, RNA, and proteomic analysis. These results are important because these aspects have been correlated with outcome, Bellmunt explains.

According to the analysis, these findings significantly increase the ability to identify low-frequency aberrations, and provide a robust basis for functional studies aimed to better understand the biology of bladder cancer. This analysis has help establish the new profile in terms of different subtypes of RNA and DNA, which will aid in the stratification of patients for clinical trials, says Bellmunt.