Method for the urinary detection of bladder cancer

A method for in-vitro detection of bladder cancer in a patient, characterized in that it comprises the steps of:

• (i) extracting the DNA contained in a urine sample taken from said patient;
• (ii) fragmenting the DNA extracted in step (i);
• (iii) marking the obtained DNA fragments uniformly with a marking agent so as to form a pool of marked DNA;
• (iv) forming at least one aliquot from the pool of marked DNA and bringing each aliquot into contact with a set of reference DNAs, said contact being carried out under conditions enabling specific hybridization of the marked DNA fragments with said reference DNAs;
• said reference DNAs comprising the DNA sequences included in each of the following loci present in the human chromosomes:
• 1p, 3q, 8q22qter, 20, 5p12-p13, 9p, 9q, 18q12, 1q22-q24, 5p, 6q22, 7, 11q13, 12q15, 13q, 15, 16, 17q, 6q25-q27, 7q, 8p, 10q, 11p, 14q22-qter, 17p, 19 and 22;
• (v) eliminating the marked DNA fragments which are not specifically hybridized to the reference DNAs;
• (vi) determining the intensity of the signal produced by the marked fragments hybridized to each of the selected reference DNAs;
• (vii) determining, for each reference DNA, the deviations between the signals obtained in comparison with those obtained with a control DNA from a healthy patient;
• (viii) deriving the patient's cancer stage from said observed deviations for the loci 1p, 3q, 8q22qter, 20, 5p12-p13, 9p, 9q, 18q12, 1q22-q24, 5p, 6q22, 7, 11q13, 12q15, 13q, 15, 16, 17q, 6q25-q27, 7q, 8p, 10q, 11p, 14q22-qter, 17p, 19 and 22.