(UroToday.com) The Society of Urologic Oncology (SUO) 2021 annual meeting in Orlando, FL hosted an overview of emergent biomarkers to identify patients with high-risk non-metastatic renal cell carcinoma (RCC) presented by Dr. Brandon Manley, MD. Dr. Manley began his talk by discussing methylation profiles in clear cell RCC (ccRCC). Wei et al. used genome-wide CpG methylation profiling, a LASSO model to develop a five-CpG-based assay for ccRCC prognosis. The five CPG-based classifiers were validated in three independent sets from China, the United States, and the Cancer Genome Atlas data set, predicting overall survival of ccRCC patients with a HR of 2.96-4.82, p<0.001. The five-CpG-based classifier categorizes patients into high and low-risk groups and the methylation profile correlates with expression of 5 genes: PITX1, FOXE3, TWF2, EHBO1L1, and RIN1.1