2018/2019 Bladder Cancer Canada Grant Recipients
Twenty-five percent of patients with bladder cancer are diagnosed with muscle-invasive disease. These patients usually receive chemotherapy followed by surgery to remove the bladder. Up to 60% of tumours, however, do not respond to chemotherapy. This study aims to measure the abnormal biological pathways in bladder tumour tissue at the RNA and protein levels, and to identify the pathways responsible for resistance to chemotherapy. This approach will allow Dr. Black’s research team to identify mechanisms of resistance to chemotherapy and, in the future, test drugs that block the identified resistance pathways. If successful, this project will open the door to novel therapies to overcome chemo-resistance.
Pictured below (L-R): Gregg Morin, PhD (Head of Proteomics, BC Cancer Genome Sciences Centre); Lead Investigator – Peter Black, MD FRCSC (Professor, University of British Columbia); Josa Batista da Costa, MD (post-doc); Kenichiro Ikeda, MD PhD (post-doc)
Metastatic bladder cancer is a lethal and under-studied disease. Chemotherapy has historically been the most effective treatment for advanced bladder cancer, but long-term survival with this metastatic disease has been a rarity. Recently, new drugs including immunotherapies are showing significant promise, but only a certain portion of patients respond to these treatments. Currently, we have no reliable way of predicting who the positive responders will be.
human bladder tumor structures. They used different human bladder cancer cell lines as proof-of-principle and were able to show that these tumou rs can be kept alive for several weeks. They were also able to treat them with various chemotherapies and saw a regression in tumour size, suggesting usability of their 3D bioprinted bladder cancer model. They are collecting human tissue samples from bladder cancer patients and starting to grow tumours using this approach. Secondly, another method they established uses whole organ decellularization. In this 3D bladder cancer model, they are engineering bladder cancer models in a more complex environment. They successfully established a protocol for whole bladder decellularizaion and established re-seeding the same organ (scaffold) with human bladder cancer cell lines. They are treating them with several chemotherapy drugs to validate their 3D model. They foresee that the 3D bladder cancer models will potentially allow them to identify the most effective therapy for each patient, translating in the improvement of patient care and quality of life.