Conditional reprogramming technology: a new tool for personalized medicine in bladder cancer?

Urinary bladder cancer is a heterogeneous group of tumors comprising various histological or molecular subgroups (1). Although cisplatin-based combination chemotherapy remains the standard of care in patients with advanced disease, many of them either have no clinical benefit from or are ineligible for systemic chemotherapy (2). More recently, systemic immunotherapy against bladder cancer, including programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1)/programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) blockade, has become available (3). With such therapeutic advances, however, the prognosis for advanced bladder cancer has not been significantly improved during the past several decades.