Personalized medicine in advanced urothelial cancer: when to treat, how to treat and who to treat.

The past decade has provided an improved understanding of the molecular mechanism of bladder cancer by defining distinct pathways in tumorigenesis and progression. Advances in technologies, such as high-throughput transcript profiling, microarrays and proteomics, offer a systematic approach to identifying targets for bladder cancer diagnostics and drug discovery. This review presents a select outline of the advances in the development of bio-markers and targets for patient prognosis and therapy selection. This paper describes a representative cohort of recent studies that have the potential to significantly impact the management of muscle invasive and metastatic urothelial carcinoma of the bladder. Space constraints do not permit this review to be comprehensive and we apologize to the authors whose work we do not cite.