Charles Rosser, MD, MBA, has a rare opportunity as a urologic oncologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center Orlando where he splits his time between treating patients and conducting experiments on mice.

 

Rosser is about to get a lot busier.

 

MD Anderson – Orlando, part of Orlando Health and affiliated with MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, was recently awarded $1.5 million in grants mostly for bladder cancer research.

 

The bulk of the funds – $1.3 million – will support a three-year project led by Rosser looking at new ways to diagnose and treat bladder cancer while Philip Arlen, PhD, and Olena Tirpak, PhD, will lead separate studies into prostate and lung cancer.

 

The money comes from the Florida Department of Health James and Esther King Biomedical Research Program and the Bankhead-Coley Cancer Research Program. It marks one of the largest cancer research grants in the state.

 

Rosser said some of the goals of the grant include how to address bladder cancer with a multi-disciplinary approach that has specialists better communicating with one another. "We want to break down these silos and get everyone working together," Rosser said.

 

An estimated 60,000 people in the United State are diagnosed each year with bladder cancer while 12,000 people likely die each year from the disease.

 

The research grants will also include some involvement with the University of Miami, Mayo Clinic Jacksonville, University of Central Florida and Moffitt Cancer Center.

 

For the first year of Rosser's research grant he will examine the effects of a new drug developed by Altor BioScience. In the second year, provided the drug yields positive results, Rosser will administer it on patients in human drug trials. In this respect, Rosser is a physician-scientist.

 

"Really the only people who can successfully take a drug from the bench to the bedside are the physician-scientists," Rosser said.

 

Other parts of the grant include researching ways to detect bladder cancer in urine rather than using invasive tests and how tobacco use contributes to onset of the disease.

 

"We're all excited and proud to bring this here," Rosser said.