With support from a new $3-million Terry Fox Frontiers Program Project Grant, researchers from the UBC Faculty of Medicine and Vancouver Prostate Centre hope to transform how bladder cancer is treated — making it more personalized, improving outcomes and helping more patients keep their bladders.
Bladder cancer is the fifth most common cancer in Canada, yet treatments have lagged behind, especially for muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) that typically require chemotherapy followed by full bladder removal.
Many patients undergo bladder removal even if the chemotherapy seems to have worked, simply because there’s no way to confirm whether any invasive cancer remains. This approach comes with serious drawbacks, as surgical removal of the bladder is associated with a high risk of complications and has a long-term negative impact on quality of life.
“Until now, we haven’t had reliable ways to know if there is cancer left in an individual patient’s bladder, so we remove the bladder just to be sure,” says lead investigator Dr. Peter Black, professor and head of the UBC Department of Urologic Sciences and director of the Vancouver Prostate Centre.
To address that, the team is developing new tools to predict and measure how well a patient is responding to treatment. Using blood and urine tests that detect tumour DNA, along with advanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), these tools will help care teams make more confident, individualized decisions.
