Iowa State researchers take on bladder cancer

With the help of a donor-funded award, two Iowa State researchers are working to advance the effectiveness of bladder cancer treatments.

Karin Allenspach, a professor of translational health and small animal internal medicine, and Jonathan Mochel, an associate professor of quantitative pharmacology, were recently named the recipients of the annual Margaret B. Barry Cancer Research Program award, which was established in 2005 with an estate gift from Margaret Barry. The pair will receive $120,000 over the next two years as they investigate canine bladder cancer to produce a model for predicting drug responses in human bladder cancer patients.

Over one million new cases of bladder cancer are diagnosed every five years, making it the ninth most common cancer in the world. It’s an aggressive cancer and one that needs improved treatment options. Due to the cancer’s high rate of recurrence and lack of effective drug therapies, the survival rate is often low.

Allenspach and Mochel will use funding from the award to collect preliminary data from College of Veterinary Medicine canine samples and human samples (provided by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota), analyze it and test new drugs that will hopefully lead to a better treatment option. They’re using an animal model to do so, because at the molecular level, dogs share several important characteristics with humans, including how frequently they get bladder cancer, how it metastasizes throughout their organs and how it responds to treatment.

The goal is to create a tool that can be used to predict drug efficacy on a particular cancer before ever using that treatment on a patient. The impact of the duo’s research is two-fold, as it will revolutionize the approach to treating bladder cancer in both humans and our furry canine companions.