Markers for Urological Malignancies

The current techniques used as the gold standard of care for the diagnosis and surveillance of urological malignancies such as cystoscopy, urine cytology and prostate-specific antigen (PSA) present many limitations such as invasiveness, insufficient accuracy and unsatisfactory cost-effectiveness. This is the reason for the explosion of interest in research into novel biomarkers that could either complement current gold standard diagnostic methods or, ideally, replace them. The list of established and experimental biomarkers for urological malignancies is huge, especially in the field of bladder and prostate cancers. Although many novel biomarkers have come and gone or are far from having the ideal characteristics of a tumour biomarker, some of them have proved to be of additional value in everyday practice. Multiple biomarker approaches and high-throughput genomic and proteomic technologies appear to be very promising, although the exciting expectations raised from the progress in these fields still need to be realised. © Touch Briefings 2010.