Grateful for the opportunity to present our CLONEVO investigator-initiated trial (IIT) in bladder cancer at
@ASCO #ASCO2025. Here are some lessons I learned along the way:
Investigator-initiated trials (IITs) are essential. IITs are clinical trials independently designed and led by physician-scientists. These trials usually start from scientific observations in the lab. They are driven by unmet clinical needs, making them uniquely powerful for testing new therapeutic hypotheses!
Investigator-initiated trials are hard! Taking something from the laboratory to the bedside 🔬➡️ 🛏️ takes years of sustained effort.
It takes a team. This truly takes a huge team of brilliant and dedicated colleagues, including clinicians such as oncologists, pathologists, urologists, research nurses, laboratory scientists, computational biologists, regulatory staff, and many more! @MHosmanMD
@cnsternberg @DoctorMargolis @DrJonesNauseef
@DrAnaMolina @DrDavidNanus @rohitjainMD
@scientistatlrge
@DrMhidalgo @notSoJunkDNA
@willbfx @ElementoLab @SuzanneColeMD @scherr_doug #clinicaltrials #teamscience
🤝 This is a model of successful industry-academia collaboration. We made the initial discoveries
@WeillCornell @FaltasLab designed and conducted the trial.
@EliLillyandCo supported the trial, and
@CarisLS supported whole-exome (WES), ctDNA WES, and RNAseq—and shared the raw data so we could do our deep computational analyses in-house and with our collaborators. We were supported by
@WCM_MeyerCancer @nyphospital
🪟 The window-of-opportunity design is a powerful platform to directly test on-target 🎯 activity in vivo, understand how therapies affect disease biology, and measure the effect directly in clinical samples. In our study of
#bladdercancer patients, we collected pre/post-treatment tissues, ctDNA, and urine cfDNA. We worked with
@WCMEnglanderIPM to establish patient-derived organoids and xenografts and performed spatial imaging mass cytometry of 630,000 single cells.
💡 Encouraging to see an efficacy signal — and even better when we can understand the underlying biology at the same time!
🙏 Immense gratitude to the patients and families who made this possible. You inspire us every day.
Funding for science and cancer research is essential. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to do this work, to take new therapeutic ideas from bench to bedside and bring hope to patients with cancer.
@ASCOPost @JCO_ASCO @OncoAlert @OncBrothers @medicalwatchBC
@PGrivasMDPhD @TwoOncDocs @OncBrothers
@Larvol @TiansterZhang @GlopesMd
@HammersMD @sonpavde @drenriquegrande
@scserendipity1 @BraunMDPhD @Uromigos
@AminNassarMD @ZiadBakouny @DrRanaMcKay
@NazliDizman @urotoday @Uromigos @DrChoueiri