Reactive oxygen species-mediated therapeutic control of bladder cancer

Urinary bladder cancer is the fifth most common cancer in the US and the most costly cancer to manage because it requires life-long surveillance to monitor for recurrence and advanced progression. Urothelial carcinomas account for more than 90% of urinary bladder cancer cases. Transurethral resection and intravesical chemotherapy or immunotherapy are effective short-term treatments of urothelial carcinoma, but long-term management has not yet been optimized. Recent therapeutic strategies emphasize the targeted interference with aberrantly-regulated signaling modulators that result from genomic alterations. However, targeted therapeutic agents might not distinguish cancer cells from their normal counterparts, resulting in undesirable adverse effects. Thus, a new approach for the treatment of urothelial carcinoma has been suggested that differentially augments cancer-associated events, leading to selective death of cancer cells but not normal cells. Many aberrantly-regulated signaling modulators are associated with the elevation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), and an increasing number of studies report agents with the ability to induce ROS in cancer cells. Accordingly, therapeutic augmentation of ROS to a lethal level in cancer cells only would induce selective death of tumor cells but not normal cells, leading to a highly effective chemotherapy strategy for urothelial carcinoma.