Congratulations to KL2 Alumnus, Bishoy Faltas, MD, for publishing his expert commentray on "Chemotherapy Options for Metastatic Urothelial Cancer Patients Who Already Received Cisplatin for Localized Disease" in UroToday. The study looks into Cisplatin-based chemotherapy being a preferred treatment option for patients. Dr. Faltas gives his opinion and states "it is unclear if re-challenge with platinum-based chemotherapy (PBC) is a better option compared to non-platinum based (NPBC) chemotherapy". Patients who received Cisplatin perioperative and then received PBC did not show a significant gain in survival rate compared to patients who recieved NPBC. However, when the data analysis was narrowed to patients who received Cisplatin-based chemotherapy over a year "after the initial perioperative chemotherapy showed that PBC was associated with better overall survival (OS) compared to NPBC (hazard ratio [HR], 0.31; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.10-0.92; P = 0.03)". 

Dr. Bishoy Faltas is currently a Gellert Family-John P. Leonard, M.D. Research Scholar and Director of Bladder Cancer Research, Englander Institute for Precision Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine. The Faltas Lab focuses on developing several novel models of urothelial bladder cancer including transgenic animal models and patient-derived models. As a CTSC KL2 Career Development Award Scholar from 2014-2016, Faltas research focused on Discovering Driver Mutations in Platinum-resistant Metastatic Urothelial Cancer. 

The CTSC KL2 Career Development Core Program supports junior faculty and senior residents and fellows by providing salary support, protected time, advanced degree training, and practical skills necessary to conduct interdisciplinary Clinical Translational Investigation within a team research environment.