Three statistical manuscripts will be submitted to the
proceedings journal issue. One is a paper already in draft form and waiting
from the first Barcelona meeting. It is a paper by David Faraggi and Andrew
Kramar dealing with selection of optimal combinations of markers. The second
will be a paper on statistical issues in meta-analyses for marker studies,
organized by Susan Groshen. The third will be a paper discussing issues
in the "retrospective design of prospective marker studies," organized
by Dan Moore. The goal is to have manuscripts prepared by mid-January.
We will determine the relation between P53 expression
and progression to muscle invasive disease in a well defined group of patients
with T1 transitional cell carcinoma of the bladder. We hope to find a clear
relation between P53 mutation and thereby the P53 protein-over expression
and progression of superficial bladder cancer. The plan is to collect patients
who have been treated in well defined trials with T1 transitional cell
carcinoma of the bladder. Patients should at least have a follow-up of
three years and should be well documented. Tissue should be available and
new slides will be obtained for P53 staining. These slides will be evaluated
prospectively.
Christer Busch and Carlos Cordon-Cardo co-chair re standardization
of p53 immunohistochemistry. The plan is to evaluate different bladder
cancer cell lines with known p53 mutations and protein expression as well
as negative lines to create a standard reference "sausage" or similar blocks
of fresh frozen or fixed cells in known proportion pos/neg. This will then
be used to define and standardize the staining of the "controls" and its
interpretation. We will use software developed in Uppsala for the objective
"reading" of the slides in an automated manner.
