Hi, my name is Rik Bryan and i'm the Director of the Bladder Cancer Research Centre
at the University of Birmingham. Bladder cancer is the 10th most common cancer in the united kingdom
it's actually the fifth most common in men and the eleventh most common in women and that means
well over ten thousand new cases per year but despite representing over three percent
of all new cancer diagnoses bladder cancer receives less than one percent
of cancer research funding and that's not just the situation here in the United Kingdom but
it's the same across the rest of Europe and North America and as a result bladder cancer patients
have not really experienced the breakthroughs that have been witnessed in other cancer settings
and outcomes from the disease have changed little for the last 20 or 30 years. We still use surgical
techniques that are decades old we use drugs that have been in existence for 20 or more years
and some of the drugs that are pillars of the treatment for bladder cancer such as
BCG have been subject to real difficulties with supply for the last eight years or more
Also, the patient pathways are prolonged the time period from diagnosis through to
definitive treatment in some cases can be well over a hundred days
so there are very many challenges facing bladder cancer patients and bladder cancer research and
that's what we hope to address through the Bladder Cancer Research Centre here at the University
of Birmingham. We are a strategic grouping of translational and multidisciplinary researchers
Translational means that we aim to use biomedical discoveries to generate
new tests and new treatments to undertake clinical trials that demonstrate whether they work or not
and then to get those new tests or treatments into the clinic as soon as is safe and acceptable.
We're multidisciplinary because our centre spans a number of different scientific disciplines
from biomedical research through to mathematics engineering and clinical trials methodology.
Our core research themes are proteomics and biomarkers, genomics and bioinformatics,
novel therapeutics, biomedical engineering, and clinical research and clinical trials
and all of those themes are aiming to address some of the research priorities that have been
identified by both bladder cancer patients and healthcare professionals treating bladder cancer
patients. So proteomics and biomarkers using the protein changes in urine and blood that accompany
bladder cancer to try and develop new tests that better predict how an individual patient's tumor
might behave. Genomics and bioinformatics using our own data from dna and rna sequencing
as well as those other data sets that are available in the public domain.
Using such data to gain new insights into the disease also to develop new biomarkers that again
better predict how an individual tumor individual patient's tumor might behave but also to develop
diagnostic biomarkers such that the disease can be diagnosed and followed up from either a
urine test or a blood test rather than a camera inspection of the bladder flexible cystoscopy.
Novel therapeutics we know that we've been using drugs such as mitomycin and bcg for decades and
they're effective in many patients but perhaps not effective enough and perhaps it would be good
to have a wider choice within our armamentarium and so for a number of years we've been working
with the Structural Genomics Consortium at the University of Oxford and have screened hundreds of
agents that could be new drugs and many of those drugs are moving forward into further development.
Biomedical engineering - some of the instruments that we use to shave tumors away from the inside
of the bladder have their origins over 80 years ago and so we're developing new devices that
can improve the functionality of our existing instruments but also developing entirely new
ways in which bladder tumors can be treated from within the bladder. And of course clinical research
and clinical trials - so what are the patterns of disease how are the patterns of disease changing,
what are the factors that influence how well patients do, what their outcomes are and clinical
trials in order to test new approaches, whether they be new tests for risk stratification or
for non-invasive diagnosis or whether they be new therapeutics but carrying out the clinical trials
that can move the scientific discoveries into the clinic much more rapidly.
So translating biomedical science into healthcare benefits for bladder cancer patients. Now of course
here at the University of Birmingham we can't do it all. We've outlined our areas of expertise
where we have a strong track record but equally there are some areas of research where we have
less experience and so we hope that our research centre will also act as quite an outwardly facing
hub to try and coordinate bladder cancer research activity both in the UK and beyond to
connect researchers who have similar interests and to help them push forward with those interests,
with those ideas, with those innovations, really to be a hub that can coordinate
improvements in care for bladder cancer patients. Thank you very much for listening