BCAN Award for Bladder Cancer Research

Fall 2010

BCAN is proud to announce that we presented Dr. Elizabeth Guancial, a Fellow in the Dana Farber/Partners Cancer Care Hematology/Oncology program in Boston, with our first bladder cancer research award.

The BCAN Award for Bladder Cancer Research was established to support research by young investigators that will increase the understanding of bladder cancer risk, biology, prevention and treatment. The award is also intended to encourage young clinicians and basic scientists to pursue a career in bladder cancer research.

Dr. Guancial was selected from a highly qualified pool of grant applicants to receive the $25,000 one-year grant. This grant will support Guancial’s research into new ways that doctors could predict which patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer will respond to platinum-based chemotherapy regimens such as Gem/Cis or MVAC.

Studies have shown that treating advanced-stage patients with platinum-based chemotherapy before they have surgery to remove the bladder (radical cystectomy) improves survival rates. However, some patients do not respond to this form of chemotherapy. Currently, doctors have no way to determine in advance of giving this chemotherapy whether a patient will respond to it.

Guancial seeks to identify new MicroRNA biomarkers that doctors could use to predict whether patients would benefit from platinum-based chemotherapy, or whether they are unlikely to respond and would be better served by moving directly to surgery. Guancial’s research could potentially spare the group of patients who would not respond to this chemotherapy from having to undergo it.

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.

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.