2012 Raymond and Maria Floyd Award
for Bladder Cancer Research

BCAN announced on  May 16, 2012 that Dr. Ami S. Bhatt of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Broad Institute has been named the recipient of the 2012 Raymond and Maria Floyd Award for Bladder Cancer Research. We would like to thank the many strong applicants from which Dr. Bhatt’s proposal was chosen, as well as the tireless members of our award review committee.

The $25,000 award will help support Dt. Bhatt’s research project to identify a bacteria or virus that may trigger bladder cancer. While environmental factors such as tobacco smoke and infections by parasites are known to cause the disease, in many bladder cancers the cause is unknown. Viruses, such as HPV, are now known to cause certain cancers such as cervical cancer. As a result, vaccines against HPV are now available and are predicted to save lives worldwide. Dr. Bhatt’s goal is to identify a viral or bacterial connection so that a similar prevention strategy can be developed for bladder cancer.

Dr. Bhatt is an honors graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles where she majored in biochemistry. She received her medical training and doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, San Francisco, completing her graduate training in the laboratory of Dr. Charles Craik. Dr. Bhatt graduated from the UCSF in 2007 and completed her Internal Medicine Residency at the Harvard Medical School affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital followed by a fellowship in Hematology and Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber/Partners Cancer Center.

Dr. Bhatt plans to pursue a career as a translational investigator, focusing her future research activities on cancer genomics and the discovery of novel microbial pathogens in human cancer.

2011 Raymond and Maria Floyd
Award for Bladder Cancer Research

BCAN announced on Friday, May 6, that Dr. Gil Redelman-Sidi, a research fellow at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, is the winner of the 2011 Raymond and Maria Floyd Award for Bladder Cancer Research.

The award will support Dr. Redelman-Sidi’s research to identify genetic changes that could predict whether bladder cancer patients will respond to instillation of BCG, a common treatment to reduce the risk of recurrences. This information could eventually be used to increase patient responsiveness to BCG treatment.

Dr. Redelman-Sidi is a fellow in the Infectious Diseases Service in Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center since 2008. He received his medical degree from Tel-Aviv University in Israel. He then served for five years as a physician in the Israeli Defense Force. He completed internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Jacobi Medical Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he stayed an additional year as a Chief Resident.

BCAN Award for Bladder Cancer Research
Presented to Dr. Elizabeth Guancial

BCAN was proud to present Dr. Elizabeth Guancial with its inaugural Bladder Cancer Research Award in 2010.

The BCAN Bladder Cancer Research Award was established to advance research that will increase the understanding of bladder cancer risk, biology, prevention and treatment while encouraging young investigators to pursue a career in bladder cancer research. Guancial was selected from a highly qualified pool of grant applicants.

The $25,000 one-year grant will help support Guancial’s research project to identify new biomarkers that can serve to identify patients who will respond to platinum-based chemotherapy for muscle invasive and advanced bladder cancer. “Ultimately I hope that my research efforts will reveal predictive markers for bladder cancer that can be used in clinical protocols and potentially lead to targets for therapeutics,” states Guancial.

Guancial is a Fellow in the Dana Farber/Partners Cancer Care Hematology/Oncology program in Boston. She received her medical degree from Harvard Medical School where she spent one year as a Howard Hughes Medical Research Fellow at the National Institutes of Health, pursuing focused research on cell motility and invasion. She completed her internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. Read more about Guancial and her research efforts in our Fall 2010 Newsletter article.

BCAN greatly appreciates the dedicated efforts of its Grant Review Committee: Dr. Mark Gonzalgo, Stanford University; Dr. Donna Hansel, Cleveland Clinic; Dr. Ashish Kamat, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center; Dr. Matthew Milowsky, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; Dr. Mark Soloway, University of Miami; Dr. Gary Steinberg, University of Chicago.