Investigators examine microbiome research in bladder cancer

In this video, Ilaha Isali, MD, MSc, and Laura Bukavina, MD, MPH, MSc, provide an overview of their recent Urologic Oncology paper “State-of-the-Art review: The Microbiome in Bladder Cancer.” Isali is a urology resident at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, New York, and Bukavina is an assistant professor of urologic oncology at Cleveland Clinic Glickman Urologic Institute and the translational science lead in GU oncology at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio.

Transcription:

Please provide an overview of this paper.

Isali: Basically, this study is a review article, and we tried to summarize all the published articles on the same topic, focusing on microbiome, not just specifically on urine. We also tried to focus on tissue microbiome, gut microbiome. All the research was done in bladder cancer. We reviewed [approximately] 150 papers on this topic, and tried to summarize all the findings that could potentially be helpful for future research in terms of bladder cancer and also some of the challenges that we highlighted in this study that we should be focusing on going forward for microbiome research.

Bukavina: The goal of the paper was to describe what's currently available in microbiome literature as it relates to bladder cancer. The goal was also to offer some insight going forward how we should be doing microbiome studies and some of the potential pitfalls of previous studies, so learning from our mistakes and many of our own lab mistakes. The initial findings have always been that there is an association between certain bacteria, such as lactobacillus, across multiple studies have been found to be beneficial whether it's stool or whether it's urine. But similarly, we know akkermansia has been one of the beneficial bacteria, in terms of response to multiple therapies. We wanted to describe some of the pitfalls as well that have happened in the past in studying urine. Urine, as many of us know, is not supposed to have many bacteria, so a lot of the studies in the past, we noticed that through our research, there's a lot of contamination, and the findings that people have been associating with bladder cancer or associating with potentially response to BCG or chemotherapy have really been contaminants, so skin contaminants, prostate contaminants, or contaminants from the urethra, and not necessarily something that is actually even clinically relevant. So going forward, we not only talked about the studies that have been done, but also talking about what should be done going forward, incorporating microbiome specimen collection, how it should be collected, how it should be processed, how it should be frozen, into clinical trials within bladder cancer.

This transcript was AI generated and edited by human editors for clarity.