E2F4 signature can predict progression of bladder cancer

"We found that the E2F4 signature is predictive of the progression of both non-muscle-invasive and muscle-invasive bladder cancer," said Cheng. "It can also predict the responsiveness of patients to intravesical Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) immunotherapy. Our results suggest that patients with positive E2F4 scores benefit significantly from BCG therapy, while the progression of patients with negative E2F4 scores does not show significant difference from untreated patients."

Intravesical BCG therapy has been widely used to treat patients with non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer, with an up to 60% success rate in preventing recurrence or progression. However, there is no effective biomarker to identify which patients are responsive to this therapy.

The Cheng study found that the E2F4 biomarker could predict the responsiveness of patients with non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer to the BCG therapy. The study was based on an integrative analysis that included gene expression profiles for more than 800 bladder tumor samples with clinical information. The data was collected from the public database Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO).

"An integration of genomic data with clinical information will provide new biological insight in cancer biology and identify new biomarkers for aiding clinical practice," explained Cheng. "Such translational studies need collective efforts from cancer biologists, clinicians, and computational biologists."

Looking forward, Cheng and Marsit plan more detailed research to validate the prognostic value of the E2F4 signature in predicting bladder cancer progression or recurrence in an independent dataset. The goal is a convenient and practical clinical test based on E2F4 to predict the efficacy of the BCG program for bladder cancer patients.