The Relationship between the Intercellular Adhesion Molecule-1 Expression and the Response to BCG Immunotherapy in Non Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer

Background: Bladder cancer is the second most common malignancy of the urogenital region. Although Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) is considered as the adjuvant treatment of choice for non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC), there is no consensus for a predictive factor to assess BCG success. The intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM1) has been reported to function in multiple malignancies, but its effect on NMIBC hasn't been discussed yet. This study attempted to evaluate if ICAM-1 could be useful predictive markers in BCG responses. Materials and Methods: Thirty primary resected NMIBC patients were included in the study. All patients received adjuvant BCG instillations. ICAM1 expression was inspected by immunohistochemistry and correlated with clinicopathologic variables. Association between protein expression and BCG therapy response was evaluated by univariate and multivariate analysis. Results: Univariate Cox regression analysis of baseline characteristics and ICAM-1 expression showed that no significant association was found with BCG immunotherapy response. In the other hand, multivariate Cox regression analysis showed that ICAM-1 protein is not an independent factor of tumor response after BCG immunotherapy. Conclusions: this study demonstrates that ICAM1 could not be a useful prognostic marker for BCG treatment in NMIBC. We emphasize that this was a preliminary study and therefore further confirmation on a larger set of tissues is necessary.