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Review
. 2023 Feb 13;24(4):3720.
doi: 10.3390/ijms24043720.

HER2 Expression in Bladder Cancer: A Focused View on Its Diagnostic, Prognostic, and Predictive Role

Francesca Sanguedolce  1 , Magda Zanelli  2 , Andrea Palicelli  2 , Alessandra Bisagni  2 , Maurizio Zizzo  3 , Stefano Ascani  4 , Maria Carmela Pedicillo  1 , Angelo Cormio  5 , Ugo Giovanni Falagario  6 , Giuseppe Carrieri  6 , Luigi Cormio  6   7
Affiliations
Review

HER2 Expression in Bladder Cancer: A Focused View on Its Diagnostic, Prognostic, and Predictive Role

Francesca Sanguedolce et al. Int J Mol Sci. .

Abstract

Bladder cancer (BC) is a heterogeneous disease from a molecular, morphological, and clinical standpoint. HER2 is a known oncogene involved in bladder carcinogenesis. Assessing HER2 overexpression as a result of its molecular changes in a routine pathology practice using immunohistochemistry might be a useful adjunct in several scenarios, namely (1) to correctly identify flat urothelial lesions and inverted urothelial lesions in the diagnostic setting; (2) to provide prognostic hints in both non-muscle invasive (NMI) and muscle invasive (MI) tumors, thus supplementing risk stratification tools, especially when evaluating higher-risk tumors such as those with variant morphology; (3) to improve antibody panels as a surrogate marker of BC molecular subtyping. Furthermore, the potential of HER2 as a therapeutic target has been only partly explored so far, in light of the ongoing development of novel target therapies.

Keywords: HER2; bladder cancer; diagnosis; immunohistochemistry; prognosis; therapeutic target.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Differential HER2 expression in flat urothelial lesions. CIS: carcinoma in situ.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Digital image analysis of HER2-stained BC tissue samples with low (left) and high (right) protein expression (original magnification 200×).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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