July 1, 2016 – New Directions

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Anchor lead:  Will an integrated approach to bladder cancer help reduce deaths from the disease? Elizabeth Tracey reports

For the first time in three decades a new treatment has received FDA approval for bladder cancer. Stephanie Cooper Greenberg, and her husband Erwin, hope many more treatments for this disease will be forthcoming with their establishment of the Greenberg Bladder Cancer Institute at Johns Hopkins. Greenberg says the problem is much bigger than most people realize.

Greenberg: Bladder cancer does affect men and women, it’s four times more prevalent in men than women and actually we’re doing some fascinating research on gender differences. Sadly it is more lethal in women.  A lot of bladder cancer is superficial, then, if not caught in time it does advance to muscle invasive bladder cancer. And then it is a very, very aggressive cancer with an 80% recurrence rate. It also happens to be the most expensive cancer to treat.   :29

Bladder cancer is the sixth most common type of cancer, the American Cancer Society reports, with about 75,000 cases each year in the US.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.