Lymphatic metastasis of bladder cancer: Molecular mechanisms, diagnosis and targeted therapy

This article provides a status report on the global burden of cancer worldwide using the GLOBOCAN 2018 estimates of cancer incidence and mortality produced by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, with a focus on geographic variability across 20 world regions. There will be an estimated 18.1 million new cancer cases (17.0 million excluding nonmelanoma skin cancer) and 9.6 million cancer deaths (9.5 million excluding nonmelanoma skin cancer) in 2018. In both sexes combined, lung cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer (11.6% of the total cases) and the leading cause of cancer death (18.4% of the total cancer deaths), closely followed by female breast cancer (11.6%), prostate cancer (7.1%), and colorectal cancer (6.1%) for incidence and colorectal cancer (9.2%), stomach cancer (8.2%), and liver cancer (8.2%) for mortality. Lung cancer is the most frequent cancer and the leading cause of cancer death among males, followed by prostate and colorectal cancer (for incidence) and liver and stomach cancer (for mortality). Among females, breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer death, followed by colorectal and lung cancer (for incidence), and vice versa (for mortality); cervical cancer ranks fourth for both incidence and mortality. The most frequently diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer death, however, substantially vary across countries and within each country depending on the degree of economic development and associated social and life style factors. It is noteworthy that high-quality cancer registry data, the basis for planning and implementing evidence-based cancer control programs, are not available in most low- and middle-income countries. The Global Initiative for Cancer Registry Development is an international partnership that supports better estimation, as well as the collection and use of local data, to prioritize and evaluate national cancer control efforts. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 2018;0:1-31. © 2018 American Cancer Society.

Solid cancers are spatially and temporally heterogeneous. This limits the use of invasive biopsy based molecular assays but gives huge potential for medical imaging, which has the ability to capture intra-tumoural heterogeneity in a non-invasive way. During the past decades, medical imaging innovations with new hardware, new imaging agents and standardised protocols, allows the field to move towards quantitative imaging. Therefore, also the development of automated and reproducible analysis methodologies to extract more information from image-based features is a requirement. Radiomics--the high-throughput extraction of large amounts of image features from radiographic images--addresses this problem and is one of the approaches that hold great promises but need further validation in multi-centric settings and in the laboratory. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The diverse malignant, stromal, and immune cells in tumors affect growth, metastasis and response to therapy. We profiled transcriptomes of ~6,000 single cells from 18 head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) patients, including five matched pairs of primary tumors and lymph node metastases. Stromal and immune cells had consistent expression programs across patients. Conversely, malignant cells varied within and between tumors in their expression of signatures related to cell cycle, stress, hypoxia, epithelial differentiation, and partial epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (p-EMT). Cells expressing the p-EMT program spatially localized to the leading edge of primary tumors. By integrating single-cell transcriptomes with bulk expression profiles for hundreds of tumors, we refined HNSCC subtypes by their malignant and stromal composition, and established p-EMT as an independent predictor of nodal metastasis, grade, and adverse pathologic features. Our results provide insight into the HNSCC ecosystem and define stromal interactions and a p-EMT program associated with metastasis.