February 2024

February 2024—From her vantage at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Donna Hansel, MD, PhD, has a clear view of cancer’s latest frontiers. Progress and breakthroughs are the norm. But even she sounds impressed when she surveys the changes in her specialty, urothelial cancer. “We are now thinking what we never before thought was possible: We are thinking about cures and lifelong remission from disease,” says Dr. Hansel, division head and professor of pathology and laboratory medicine. It’s been a long time coming, says Dr. Hansel, who is also the Dr. Eva Lotzova and Peter Lotz memorial research chair. The disease historically has been caught in a sort of prepositional triangle—underfunded, overlooked, and underdiagnosed—with serious consequences. For years, she says, “We thought bladder cancer had only one treatment”—BCG, or Bacillus Calmette-Guérin, therapy. Because the field lacked a large volume of research to propel better diagnostics and treatments, “people died of this disease because it progressed.”

February 2024—When multimodality testing reveals discordant biomarker results, which method is correct? Annette S. Kim, MD, PhD, and JinJuan Yao, MD, PhD, in a CAP23 session last fall used their cases to share strategies for resolving discrepancies—or, in some cases, what look like discrepancies.