BCAN Awards $600,000 to Drive Breakthroughs in Bladder Cancer

July 7, 2025

Research Innovation Awards Fuel Next-Generation Treatments to Save Lives and Preserve Quality of Life

(Bethesda, MD) – Today, the Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network (BCAN) announced the recipients of its 2025 Research Innovation Awards. These prestigious $300,000 awards honor exceptional researchers for their dedication, groundbreaking ideas and innovative contributions to advancing bladder cancer research.

This year’s honorees are Michael A. O’Donnell, MD, the Richard D. Williams Chaired Professor of Urology and Director of Urologic Oncology at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, and Andrew Hsieh, MD, Professor and Associate Director in the Division of Human Biology at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. These highly competitive grants, totaling $300,000 each over two years, are part of BCAN’s ongoing commitment to creating better todays and more tomorrows for bladder cancer patients and those who love them. 

This support is designed to tackle critical challenges, fill key knowledge gaps and ultimately improve outcomes for bladder cancer patients and their loved ones. In total, BCAN has awarded more than $11 million in bladder cancer research funding.

The need for continued research is critical: more than 725,000 people in the United States are currently living with bladder cancer. In 2025 alone, over 83,000 individuals are expected to be diagnosed, and more than 16,000 lives will be lost to the disease.

Dr. O’Donnell’s research will focus on developing a personalized tool to help select the best sequential doublet chemotherapy (SDC) options as well as measure the disappearance of any residual tumor during therapy. Dr. O’Donnell and his team also plan to develop a urine test that not only tells if the drug(s) is/are working but also provides a method to measure how much tumor remains. Collectively, this new process should provide doctors and patients with valuable insight into personalizing effective SDC treatment for non-muscle invasive bladder cancer.

Dr. O’Donnell said, “Although I am a surgeon by training, my goal as a bladder cancer uro-oncologist has always been to save bladders whenever possible. The BCAN Research Innovation Award will allow me to leverage my more than 30 years of clinical experience coupled with state-of-the-art technology from my collaborators at the University of Bern, Switzerland, to fundamentally improve the chances for these patients with early bladder cancer to keep their bladders healthy and cancer-free.”

Dr. Hsieh’s research aims to uncover how mutations in other commonly altered genes contribute to diversity in bladder cancer. Using advanced methods, his research team will explore how these mutations affect the formation of diverse cell populations and how this impacts tumor growth and response to therapy. Additionally, Dr. Hsieh and the team will test a new drug designed to stop protein production, with the goal of reducing tumor diversity and improving treatment outcomes. By studying how diversity arises and its role in cancer progression, this work could lead to new treatments that target tumor populations, offering hope for patients with advanced and treatment-resistant bladder cancer.

“This award is meaningful because it highlights the importance of our research in bladder cancer heterogeneity and supports the vision of developing methods to target this problem in patients,” Dr. Hsieh shared.

The Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network, or BCAN, was founded in 2005 and provides patients with the critical information and community support they need to thrive today – and champions innovative research and responsive national policy to inspire hope for tomorrow.

Contact:

Mark Story
Vice President of Communications and Marketing
[email protected]
301-215-9099, x208