# Validating Urine Derived Cancer Cells (UDCC) -- Non-Invasive and Living Liquid Biopsies -- in Bladder Cancer Clinics

> **NIH NIH R33** · OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $390,660

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Bladder cancer (BC) is the costliest cancer (per case) among all cancer types and yet among the top 10
cancers it is the most underfunded cancer by NCI. There has been no significant improvement in overall
survival and prognosis over the last thirty years except for the recent development of immunotherapy. At initial
diagnosis, approximately 75% of cases are diagnosed at the non-muscle-invasive stages, and are usually
treated with transurethral resection (TUR) followed by intravesical instillation of therapeutic agents into the
bladder cavity in high risk patients. This approach is associated with cancer recurrence of over 60% at two
years and progression into advanced stages in up to 25% of patients. Therefore, almost all patients will need
long-term expensive cystoscopy. If a sensitive but less expensive method to detect cancer were available, it
would improve the treatment outcomes and decrease the cost. For locally advanced BC, neoadjuvant
chemotherapy is associated with a complete response of less than 40%. For metastatic BC, the response rate
for the first-line platinum-based chemotherapy is approximately 50%. It is less than 20% for second-line
chemotherapy. Currently no method is available to predict which patients will respond to therapy. Liquid
biopsies are non-invasive methods that may be applicable for cancer precision medicine. Circulating factors,
including circulating tumor cells (CTCs), cfDNAs, RNAs (miRNAs, long non-coding RNAs [lncRNAs], mRNAs),
cell-free proteins, peptides, or exosomes et al., are derived from cells in human body. However, it is still
unclear where and at what tumor stage these circulating molecules are coming from. There are still too many
technical issues that limit the study of CTC biology and their applications. Our latest data show that we are
able to generate conditionally reprogrammed cell cultures (CRC) from urine samples of 60 BC patients.
Therefore, we will focus on CR technology for generating urine-derived cultures to predict efficacy of treatment
and recurrence of BC. We will also determine if urine-derived cell cultures are a simpler and potentially more
sensitive technique to monitor bladder cancer recurrence. Urine samples from 70-90 BC cases (prior to initial
transurethral resection and chemotherapy) will be used to generate bladder cancer cultures. Following
therapy, the patients will be monitored every 3 months (for a total of 2 years) by cystoscopy, and urine cell
culture. By comparing the detection of recurrence by each of these techniques, we can determine whether cell
culture and/or mutant hTERT detection can provide sufficient sensitivity and specificity to replace the
expensive and invasive cystoscopy procedure. We will also use cell cultures derived from pre-surgery patients
to evaluate for sensitivity to standard of care drugs and compared with the clinical response of the patient to
these same drugs. Last, we
will use CR cultures from non-responding patients or recurr...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10174475
- **Project number:** 1R33CA258016-01
- **Recipient organization:** OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Xuefeng Liu
- **Activity code:** R33 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $390,660
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-05-01 → 2024-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10174475

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10174475, Validating Urine Derived Cancer Cells (UDCC) -- Non-Invasive and Living Liquid Biopsies -- in Bladder Cancer Clinics (1R33CA258016-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10174475. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*