In our recent publication we identified a group of bladder cancer-specific ncRNA, called T-UCRs that are the most up-regulated in bladder cancer patient samples compared with normal bladder urothelium.
Molecular function of the most up-regulated T-UCRs, uc.8+, has been studied in detail in bladder cancer J82 cell line as reported in Olivieri et al. 2016. We demonstrated that the expression of uc.8+ was inversely related to BlCa grade , suggesting an early alteration of this lncRNA in the disease pathway of BlCa development. Our preliminary results based on 24 patients and 21 healthy subjects, show that uc.8+ can be detected in patient urine samples and that is up-regulated when compared with normal urines. In particular, uc.8+ levels were significantly higher in patients when compared with normal subjects (Mann-Whitney U test p-value=0.007; Figure 1B). The diagnostic accuracy of uc.8+ was also confirmed by Roc Curve Analysis, which shows an AUC of 0.74 (95% C.I. 0.59 to 0.88).
A considerable number of urinary molecular biomarkers have been proposed for bladder cancer diagnostics, including several coding and non-coding RNAs, usually as panels. The novel idea in this project is that of using one particular non-coding RNA which is most strongly expressed in low-grade (i.e. non-muscle-invasive) tumors. Such tumors are not well detected by current assays such as urine cytology or UroVysion which typically rely on properties of high-grade (and therefore also invasive) tumors.