SPEAKER: In this study, we found that there's a unique group of patients with a specific type of bladder cancer that show a genetic abnormality identical to breast cancer patients and that potentially they would respond to the same therapy that breast cancer patients respond to. And typically, this type of bladder cancer is very aggressive. And this is a potential therapy and effective treatment for those patients. So the next step would be clinical trials looking at the effectiveness of the breast cancer drug in these patients.

For these patients with this specific type of bladder cancer, really, the only effective treatment is early detection and radical cystectomy or major surgery. So there really is no effective treatment at this time. So I think this finding, the presence of this HER2 amplification, is a real target that will allow us to treat patients that would otherwise have no options.

We need to recognize that bladder cancer is not all-- is not just one entity, but it's a spectrum of different entities, each with genetic changes. And it's important for us to recognize that bladder cancer is not bladder cancer is not bladder cancer and that each is going to be treated potentially differently based on its genetic changes. So the therapy is no longer directed at the diagnosis-- a tumor in the long-- but it's more at the genetic level. So we may treat lung cancers like we treat some bladder cancers like we treat some breast cancers based on the genetic changes, not on what I see under the microscope. So that's a real paradigm shift for us as pathologists and clinicians-- that really, we're targeting the individual patient and not what it looks to us under the microscope.