Hoping to improve outcomes and survival rates for NMIBC patients – Dan Theodorescu

According to Dan Theodorescu, He is thrilled that our study examining high-risk, non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC) treated with Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) has been published in Science Translational Medicine. BCG immunotherapy benefits many high-risk NMIBC patients, but for the remaining the cancer returns within five years, and these patients have a significant risk of progressing to advanced muscle invasive disease which is associated with much higher mortality rates. Our research has identified three distinct subtypes among these tumors and one of the subtypes, BCG Response Subtype 3 (BRS3), was associated with reduced progression-free survival. BRS3 was the dominant subtype among patients whose cancer recurred after BCG therapy, and we have shown that a commercially available test can identify BRS3 tumors.

It has been fantastic to continue working with Tahlita Zuiverloon who was a Postdoctoral Fellow in my lab and is now a faculty Urologic Surgeon at Erasmus MC in the Netherlands. I’m also glad to continue to collaborate with Jim Costello, Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Colorado, who I helped to recruit when I was the Colorado Cancer Center Director.  We have started a follow-up study to further determine whether BRS3 can help predict response to treatment. We hope this research will provide insights into novel alternatives to BCG treatments and we are actively working on this, ultimately hoping to improve outcomes and survival rates for NMIBC patients.

Source: Dan Theodorescu/Linkedin