For many bladder cancer survivors, life after treatment means returning every few months so a doctor can thread a scope into the bladder to look for new tumors. A urine test described in Nature Medicine on October 2 could someday ease that routine, but it is still experimental.
The test, called uRARE-seq, was developed by researchers at Stanford Medicine, with contributions from the VA Palo Alto Health Care System and Resero Bio. In a study of 683 urine samples from patients and healthy volunteers, it correctly identified 95% of people with localized bladder cancer and gave a clean result to 90% of people without the disease, according to Stanford Medicine's announcement of the study. It outperformed standard urine cytology, in which urine is checked under a microscope for cancer cells, and a DNA-based urine test.
