Molecular Signatures in Urologic Tumors

Urologic tumors continue to represent a huge fraction of cancer cases in the United States, with over 376,310 estimated new diagnoses in 2013. As with many types of tumors, urologic tumors vary greatly in their phenotype, ranging from minimally invasive to malignancies possessing great metastatic potential. The increasing need for more efficient and less invasive methods of cancer detection, as well as the ability to predict severity of the disease phenotype is readily evident--yet reliable methods remain elusive in a clinical setting today. Comprehensive panels of gene clusters are being developed toward the generation of molecular signatures in order to better diagnose urologic malignancies, and identify effective treatment strategies in the emerging era of personalized medicine. In this review, we discuss the current literature on the credibility and biomarker value of such molecular signatures in the context of clinical significance relating to the pathological aggressiveness of urologic tumors (prostate, bladder and renal cancer)--also exploiting their predictive potential in the response to treatment.