Identification of endothelial-related molecular subtypes for bladder cancer patients

This article provides an update on the global cancer burden using the GLOBOCAN 2020 estimates of cancer incidence and mortality produced by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Worldwide, an estimated 19.3 million new cancer cases (18.1 million excluding nonmelanoma skin cancer) and almost 10.0 million cancer deaths (9.9 million excluding nonmelanoma skin cancer) occurred in 2020. Female breast cancer has surpassed lung cancer as the most commonly diagnosed cancer, with an estimated 2.3 million new cases (11.7%), followed by lung (11.4%), colorectal (10.0 %), prostate (7.3%), and stomach (5.6%) cancers. Lung cancer remained the leading cause of cancer death, with an estimated 1.8 million deaths (18%), followed by colorectal (9.4%), liver (8.3%), stomach (7.7%), and female breast (6.9%) cancers. Overall incidence was from 2-fold to 3-fold higher in transitioned versus transitioning countries for both sexes, whereas mortality varied <2-fold for men and little for women. Death rates for female breast and cervical cancers, however, were considerably higher in transitioning versus transitioned countries (15.0 vs 12.8 per 100,000 and 12.4 vs 5.2 per 100,000, respectively). The global cancer burden is expected to be 28.4 million cases in 2040, a 47% rise from 2020, with a larger increase in transitioning (64% to 95%) versus transitioned (32% to 56%) countries due to demographic changes, although this may be further exacerbated by increasing risk factors associated with globalization and a growing economy. Efforts to build a sustainable infrastructure for the dissemination of cancer prevention measures and provision of cancer care in transitioning countries is critical for global cancer control.

Cancer treatment by immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) can bring long-lasting clinical benefits, but only a fraction of patients respond to treatment. To predict ICB response, we developed TIDE, a computational method to model two primary mechanisms of tumor immune evasion: the induction of T cell dysfunction in tumors with high infiltration of cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) and the prevention of T cell infiltration in tumors with low CTL level. We identified signatures of T cell dysfunction from large tumor cohorts by testing how the expression of each gene in tumors interacts with the CTL infiltration level to influence patient survival. We also modeled factors that exclude T cell infiltration into tumors using expression signatures from immunosuppressive cells. Using this framework and pre-treatment RNA-Seq or NanoString tumor expression profiles, TIDE predicted the outcome of melanoma patients treated with first-line anti-PD1 or anti-CTLA4 more accurately than other biomarkers such as PD-L1 level and mutation load. TIDE also revealed new candidate ICB resistance regulators, such as SERPINB9 , demonstrating utility for immunotherapy research.

GeneMANIA (http://www.genemania.org) is a flexible, user-friendly web interface for generating hypotheses about gene function, analyzing gene lists and prioritizing genes for functional assays. Given a query list, GeneMANIA extends the list with functionally similar genes that it identifies using available genomics and proteomics data. GeneMANIA also reports weights that indicate the predictive value of each selected data set for the query. Six organisms are currently supported (Arabidopsis thaliana, Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, Mus musculus, Homo sapiens and Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and hundreds of data sets have been collected from GEO, BioGRID, Pathway Commons and I2D, as well as organism-specific functional genomics data sets. Users can select arbitrary subsets of the data sets associated with an organism to perform their analyses and can upload their own data sets to analyze. The GeneMANIA algorithm performs as well or better than other gene function prediction methods on yeast and mouse benchmarks. The high accuracy of the GeneMANIA prediction algorithm, an intuitive user interface and large database make GeneMANIA a useful tool for any biologist.