Modern approaches to diagnosis and prediction of course of urothelial cancer

Urothelial cancer (UC) holds one of the leading positions amongst oncourological diseases. Rate of cancer is growing all around the world and according to experts the growth rate of cancer is estimated as alarming. Clinical implications of the early disease are so poor that they result in late detection of the decease. Understanding of tumor’s pathogenesis opened the door for development of new approaches for diagnosis of cancer, use of innovative methods and technologies. The modern UC diagnostics includes a variety of lab tests and special exams (invasive method and noninvasive methods). Considering low informative value and limited prospects of these methods, today there are researches in improvement of methods which are already being used and development of new methods for early diagnosis and forecasting of the decease being done. Detecting the most specific, vulnerable and informative markers or its combination of the UC is a pressing topic. In this article we consider questions of peculiarities of structure and site of the UC from all angles; we show directions of the UC phenotype research and results of molecular pan-cancer analysis; new tendencies in the UC classification based on study of genetic profile of the UC’s different forms; a short review of the researched molecular genetic markers of early detection of the UC and prognosticating its progression; prognostic value of somatic mutation in the UC; we evaluate the connection between gene expression, invasion, tumor’s prevalence and survivability in the UC patients; we give some data on our own researches in the UC diagnostics improvement, study of expression of cancer/testis antigen and detection of abnormalities in genetic code in the UC.