摘要
Muscle-invasive bladder cancer(MIBC)constitutes-25%of newly diagnosed bladder cancer cases.Patients with MIBC are optimally treated with platinum-based neoadjuvant chemotherapy(NAC)prior to radical cystectomy,which improves overall survival compared to surgery alone.While the goal of NAC is to downstage the primary tumor and afford early systemic treatment of micrometastasis,more than 60%of patients receiving NAC will not demonstrate significant local responses.Without accurate biomarkers predicting those that will benefit from NAC,a large cohort of patients will not only be exposed to the side effects of chemotherapy but also unnecessarily be subjected to delayed curative surgical intervention.This dilemma in the current management of patients with this aggressive disease highlights the importance of a recent discovery by Vollmer and colleagues,who reported that the intratumoral CXCR3alt-CXCL11 chemokine axis may be associated with the response to NAC in MIBC.
