Urinary Interleukin-8 May Be the Ultimate Bladder Cancer Biomarker

A recently published study established that the urinary protein interleukin-8 (IL-8) not only distinguished bladder cancer from controls, it also discriminated high grade from low grade disease, and the successive clinical stages of bladder cancer.

The potential usefulness of this biomarker was determined by investigators at the University of Houston (Texas, USA). These investigators had set out to identify novel urine protein biomarkers of bladder cancer using a Luminex (Austin, TX, USA) based screening platform.


For this study, the investigators analyzed urine samples from 66 subjects, comprised of 31 urology clinic controls and 35 bladder cancer patients, using a Luminex based screening platform. ELISA validation was carried out for the top four prospective urine biomarkers using an independent cohort of 20 urology clinic controls and 60 bladder cancer (BC) subjects.
Results revealed that of the 16 proteins screened by the Luminex platform, 10 showed significant elevation in BC compared to the controls. Eight of these urine proteins were able to differentiate BC from control urine with AUC values exceeding 0.70 with specificity values exceeding 0.9. Upon ELISA validation, urine IL-1alpha, IL-1ra, and IL-8 were able to distinguish control urine from urine drawn from various bladder cancer stages, with IL-8 being the best discriminator. Overall, IL-8 displayed the highest significance in discriminating between controls and BC patients and discriminating highly advanced stages/grades of BC from less advanced stages/grades of BC.

Senior author Dr. Chandra Mohan, professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Houston, said, "Bladder cancer (BC) is the sixth most common cancer diagnosis in the United States and is over four times more common in men than women. Urine biomarkers could potentially provide preliminary confirmation of low-grade BC before invasive procedures are performed and facilitate surveillance of BC."

The Luminex-based study was published in the April 13, 2021, online edition of the journal Oncotarget.


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