Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 10, 2025

Culture of Bladder Cancer Organoids as Precision Medicine Tools
Published on: December 28, 2021
[Liquid biopsy to indvidualise therapy in advanced bladder cancer]
1Dept of Urology and Pediatric Urology, Saarland University Hospital and Saarland University Faculty of Medicine, Homburg, Germany.
Abstract:
Biomarker development is focussing more and more on the analysis of body fluids ("liquid biopsy") due to its advantages compared to tissue analysis. In addition to proteins and lipoproteins, circulating tumour cells (CTCs), extracellular vesicles (EVs) and cell-free nucleic acids (DNA, RNA) can be investigated from body fluids. Treatment of muscle-invasive balder cancer (MIBC) is still challenging. Therefore, new biomarkers are warranted to estimate the metastatic risk, to detect metastatic spread at an early time point and to select the most effective systemic therapy in a given patient. This review gives an overview of liquid biopsy from blood in patients with advanced MIBC and considers CTCs, EVs as well as circulating DNA (ctDNA) and non-coding RNA (ncRNA) and their role for prognostic evaluation and selecting treatment.

