Personalized Medicine Approach in Bladder Cancer Treatment: Genomic/Transcriptomic Analyses and Tumour Modelling

Bladder cancer is among the cancers with a high incidence both globally and in our country. The efficacy of chemotherapy in bladder cancer varies even among patients with the same diagnosis, type, grade, and histological stage. This discrepancy in treatment response among different patients poses challenges for uniform treatment approaches and even delays treatment for patients resistant to chemotherapy. Seeking solutions to these issues, researchers have proposed the personalized medicine approach. This approach is made possible through the combined application of comprehensive genomic and clinical analyses.

In this study, conducted within the scope of TÜSEB Türkiye Cancer Institute National Genome and Bioinformatics Project, it is aimed to pioneer the field of personalized medicine in Türkiye by performing genomic and transcriptomic analyses of patients with bladder cancer—one of the most common cancer types in our country—before and after treatment. With this objective, whole genome sequencing will be performed to analyse genetic alterations in patients with bladder cancer collected from Türkiye. To complement this sequence data, gene expression changes will be determined via RNA-seq, and bioinformatics analyses will be conducted by correlating these findings with the clinical history. Subsequently, organoid culture biobanks will be established from the tissues obtained from the patients, thereby providing the infrastructure for creating patient-derived tumour models in bladder cancer. Through these comprehensive genetic analyses, it will be possible to discover numerous genes whose alterations in bladder cancer are not yet known. More importantly, the identification of genetic alterations and their evaluation in conjunction with clinical data will enable the emergence of novel biomarkers that can be used for diagnosis, prognosis, drug resistance, therapeutic purposes, or the identification of patient subgroups capable of responding to specific targeted therapies.