Approved research

Germline prognostic markers and gene-environment interaction with smoking for urinary bladder cancer

Lay summary

It has been argued improvements in clinical management of urinary bladder cancer would provide most benefit to both patients and health systems. However, the inclusion of genetic information for disease prognostication has been challenging due to inconsistent findings and overall complexity of genetic variation and observed phenotypes. We aim to further explore the issue by investigating whether there are mutations associated with certain tumour and patient characteristics at the time of diagnosis (that can directly affect prognosis) or cancer recurrence itself. As it has been observed germline variation may have a different effect for smokers and non-smokers, we also aim to investigate whether there is evidence for gene-environment interaction with smoking for baseline characteristics of urinary bladder cancer and/or disease recurrence. The project is set to last for until September 2019 and will provide evidence that may be further used to calibrate existing urinary bladder cancer management approaches.