Andrei Cumpanas: Dear viewers, my name is Andrei Cumpanas. I am a LIFT research scholar here at University of California Irvine's Department of Urology. And today, I'm going to be presenting the results of our study entitled A Pilot Study on the Dark Matter of Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma: The Role of the Urinary Microbiome. With the discovery of the urinary microbiome, we are now only beginning to explore how the urinary microbiome relates to different urologic maladies. As such, we start to compare the urinary microbiome between patients with simple renal cysts at two time points and patients with histologically confirmed clear cell renal cell carcinoma before and after surgical removal of the tumor.

Urine samples underwent 16 S ribosomal RNA sequencing. Bacterial diversity parameters were also determined. Gardnerella and Enterococcus were particularly abundant only in the renal cancer group. There was no difference in richness between the first and the second urine sample for patients with simple renal cysts. In the renal cancer group, however, there was a decreased bacterial richness preoperatively, which increased after the surgical removal of the tumor, but failed to equal the richness noted in the simple renal cyst group. In conclusion, testing the urine for evidence of Gardnerella and Enterococcus and monitoring the richness of the urinary microbiome may in the future, serve as a screening test for clear cell renal cell carcinoma. Thank you.