RESEARCH ARTICLE Protein Interactome of Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer

Muscle invasive bladder carcinoma is a complex, multifactorial disease caused by disrup-tions and alterations of several molecular pathways that result in heterogeneous pheno-types and variable disease outcome. Combining this disparate knowledge may offer insights for deciphering relevant molecular processes regarding targeted therapeutic ap-proaches guided by molecular signatures allowing improved phenotype profiling. The aim of the study is to characterize muscle invasive bladder carcinoma on a molecular level by in-corporating scientific literature screening and signatures from omics profiling. Public domain omics signatures together with molecular features associated with muscle invasive bladder cancer were derived from literature mining to provide 286 unique protein-coding genes. These were integrated in a protein-interaction network to obtain a molecular functional map of the phenotype. This feature map educated on three novel disease-associated pathways with plausible involvement in bladder cancer, namely Regulation of actin cytoskeleton, Neu-rotrophin signalling pathway and Endocytosis. Systematic integration approaches allow to study the molecular context of individual features reported as associated with a clinical phe-notype and could potentially help to improve the molecular mechanistic description of the disorder