Leadership at Yale Urology has committed again to back its new tradition of “Shark Tank,” a departmental research competition patterned after the television show of the same name, which aims to promote innovation that can include even risky ideas.
During this, the competition’s second year, two teams have received funding to work on original projects.
A team led by Adam Hittelman, MD, PhD, and Darryl Martin, PhD, will use its funding to try to identify new treatments for urinary tract infections in the pediatric spina bifida population.
“We are excited to receive the urology pilot grant,” says Hittelman. “Recurrent urinary tract infections are an especially challenging problem with this group [of patients]. We hope to collect enough initial data to apply for an NIH grant.”
Chair Isaac Y. Kim, MD, PhD, MBA, started the program in 2023 to serve as seed money – encouraging faculty to take calculated risks and try new approaches across divisions that may lead to innovative solutions. With enough data, it is possible these groups may receive sustainable backing and move the dial on patient care.
Fed Ghali, MD, and John Onofrey, PhD, lead the other team awarded in this year’s competition. They are set on answering the question asked by a subset of bladder cancer patients having surgery after chemo: "If there was no cancer in the bladder, why did I need to have this big surgery?”
“It turns out at least part of the answer is that we do not have a reliable way to identify chemo-responders that have been made cancer-free until their bladder is already removed and assessed by a pathologist,” says Ghali.
Through their research, titled "Integrating machine learning and radiomics for automated assessment of pathologic response following neoadjuvant chemotherapy in muscle-invasive bladder cancer,” Drs. Ghali and Onofrey are eager to see where it will lead patient care.
They have already begun to gather data and organize the next steps of their study, with a particular focus on technology.
“Dr. Onofrey and his associates specialize in machine learning and artificial intelligence for evaluating imaging studies. For instance, he and his lab use CT scans to glean all kinds of information that humans can’t extract by standard methods of interpretation,” says Ghali. “It’s possible this technology could help us identify those super-responders to chemotherapy and perhaps avoid radical surgery in up to 40% of patients.”
The Department of Urology’s inaugural “Shark Tank” competition in 2023 had several winners, including Darryl Martin, PhD, and Ralph Devito, MD.
Their research aims to determine the prevalence of needle tract circulating tumor cells, which are cancer cells that break away from the primary tumor and enter the bloodstream.
“We are still in the project's data collection phase but are very excited about its direction,” says Martin. “Dr. Devito and I have established a strong collaboration and are working well together. The project's next phase will be data analysis and manuscript preparation, and then we will seek additional funding opportunities.”
Yale Urology’s new vice chair of research, Michael Leapman, MD, MHS, says he is pleased with the overall progress of the competition. “The pilot awards represent an exciting investment, allowing investigators to ask innovative and provocative questions that may translate into new discoveries in the future.”