The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) have announced the results of their Spring 2024 Project Grant competition. Dr. Madhuri Koti (Biomedical and Molecular Sciences) has been awarded $975,376 for the project Targeting B cell exhaustion in BCG non-responsive bladder cancer.
For more than 50 years, Bacillus Calmette Guérin (BCG) immunotherapy has been the standard immunotherapy treatment for bladder cancer. While BCG immunotherapy, delivered directly into the bladder, remains the ‘poster child’ among the most successful immunotherapies to treat cancer, it is not effective for many patients and there is still a need for biomarkers for early identification of patients who will not benefit from this treatment, and novel therapies that can be combined with BCG to improve response and reduce recurrence or progression to higher stage. Learn more about this research by watching Dr. Koti’s 5 à 7 Talk.
“This CIHR grant is very special for me in this very competitive funding environment, because we ranked first out of 45 applications from across the country that were reviewed in the panel, and conducting this research at Queen’s is even more special because it is the birthplace of BCG immunotherapy for bladder cancer. Securing this grant was only made possible by hard work from my trainees, help from collaborators, and most importantly patients who consented to donate blood and tissue samples for our research”. – Dr. Madhuri Koti