Florida currently ranks number two in the country in bladder cancer, the costliest cancer to treat¹. Dr. Vinata Lokeshwar, translational researcher and 2008 Bankhead-Coley Program Bridge Grant recipient from the University of Miami, is developing more accurate, less invasive ways to determine how aggressive a patient’s tumor is. This test will open the door for individual therapy, identifying those patients with a high likelihood of invasive cancer who require bladder removal and sparing patients with less invasive types of cancer from unnecessary removal.

When a tight federal budget (Dr. Lokeshwar missed funding by 1 percent) threatened to stall this work for a year, Dr. Lokeshwar’s team received Bridge funding to continue generating data for another grant application without staff layoffs. With the next round of submissions, Dr. Lokeshwar’s lab received $1.6 million in additional funding from two different funding sources. Based on the preliminary data from the Bankhead-Coley grant, she has developed prognostic markers that provide more information about bladder tumors than has ever been available. In addition, she is now developing new therapeutics.

Stemming from this work is a patent application, new team research in kidney cancer, and an international collaborative book project with Dr. Lokeshwar as editor. Unsurprising, the benefits of her research have helped her institution as well. “We are getting a critical mass of people here and can put together team grants now. We need a concerted effort to determine why this cancer is so high in Florida.”

¹“Estimated Number of New Cancer Cases and Deaths by State-2009.” American Cancer Society. Available at http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@nho/documents/document/2009casesdeathssitestatepdf.pdf.