SUMMARY
Patients with high-risk non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC) are at risk for disease progression, which encompasses significant treatment-related and cancer-specific morbidity and mortality. Therefore, stratification of patients is important to identify patients that are at risk for progression of disease. However, current risk stratification lacks accuracy to identify which patients will progress and ultimately succumb to their disease. This PhD thesis focused on identifying prognostic biomarkers to optimise risk stratification of patients with NMIBC. The tumour immune microenvironment (TIME) and markers for basal and luminal differentiation were analysed using an immunohistochemical (IHC) panel in patients with high-risk T1 NMIBC. Interestingly, we identified fibroblast activation protein-α (FAP) expression as a prognostic marker for progression in highrisk NMIBC. FAP is a marker for cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAF), which play an important role in the TIME.
(BELG J MED ONCOL 2024;18(1):29–32)
