Vandana Solanki

Post-Doctoral fellowship

Erasmus University Medical Centre, Netherland

VALIDATE Role: Network Associate

Research Keywords:

Vaccine designing, biochemistry, Host-pathogen interaction, and Bacterial resistance

Biography:

Bladder cancer (BC) is a very common cancer with an incidence of 7000 cases/yr in The Netherlands, 75% of which consists of non-muscle invasive disease. The recommended treatment for high-risk non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (HR-NMIBC) patients is adjuvant intravesical instillations with Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) for 3 years. BCG therapy, however, results in a BC recurrence rate of 40% at 5 years and significant toxicity, leading to early termination of therapy in 10% of treated patients. Additionally, BCG is very difficult to produce, resulting in an ongoing global shortage since 2014, leaving the surgical removal of bladder (radical cystectomy: RC) as the only curative option besides BCG. Thus, there is urgent need for less toxic, more effective and readily available alternative treatment options in HR-NMIBC. Additionally, it is critical to be able to predict BCG failure (i.e. recurrence or progression), as patients who develop progression during BCG have a 50-60% risk of death within 5 years of treatment failure. Therefore, it is critical to delineate the molecular mechanisms driving progression in HR-NMIBC in order to: 1) both improve patient selection for BCG and spare BCG in patients who will not benefit, as well as 2) identify druggable molecular targets for novel bladder-sparing treatment regimens.

In line with our aims, the international (BCAN) and Dutch (Leven met blaas- of nierkanker) patient advocacy groups have prioritized the identification of markers of BCG response, and the development of alternative bladder-sparing treatments for HR-NMIBC patients as critical research objectives for the scientific community.

Key Publications :

Web Links of Interest:

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