Bladder cancer is the most common type of genitourinary cancer in China, with an estimated 80,500 new cases and 32,900 related deaths in 2015 alone (Chen et al., 2016). Unlike many other cancers, there has been no significant improvement in survival rates for bladder cancer over the last three decades. Specific treatment regimens for bladder cancer and their efficacy vary depending not only on clinical stages, but also on associated risk factors and other personal clinical characteristics. Patients with non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC) have a high 5-year recurrence rate of 60%–70%(Berdik, 2017) and those with muscle invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) has a relatively poor prognosis with approximately 65% risk of death within 5-year follow-up (Kamat et al., 2016). Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop models for bladder cancer to screen for rational treatment strategies by personalized medicine to improve the clinical assessment and treatment of bladder cancer.

Conditional reprogramming (CR) technique is a transformational method of cell culture that allows rapid and efficient generation of cells from normal and tumor tissues (Jin et al., 2018). Patient-derived cells can grow indefinitely without genetic manipulation (Liu et al., 2012) and has been proven useful in basic and clinical research in many kinds of cancers (Saeed et al., 2017). In previous cases, CR cultures (CRCs) were generated using biopsy or surgery samples collected through invasive approaches. While it might not be easily performed or accepted in some cases. Liquid biopsies have been proven to provide equally accurate and dynamic clinical information and can capture the complex genetic mutations of profiles of primary and metastatic tumors (Karachaliou et al., 2015). Urine is the most convenient source of liquid biopsies and has been extensively explored for clinical diagnosis of bladder cancer by cytology and biomarkers (Di Meo et al., 2017). Therefore, the establishment of primary urine-derived cancer cell models using CR technique might be ideal in clinical practice. We adapted a CR technique to explore the possibility of establishing bladder cancer cells from patients’ tumor tissues and urine samples and applied the cultures for whole exome sequencing (WES) and drug testing (Fig. 1 A). All