Penn Urology is pleased to announce that Trinity J. Bivalacqua, MD, PhD, of the James Buchanan Brady Urological Institute and Department of Urology, Johns Hopkins Hospital, has joined Penn Urology as Director of Urologic Oncology.
Dr. Bivalacqua attended the Brady Urological Institute for his urology residency after earning his MD and PhD degrees from Tulane University School of Medicine, where he was the first to show that both gene- and stem cell-based therapies improved penile vascular function in preclinical models of erectile dysfunction. At the Brady Urological Institute, he became the first resident to be awarded an MD/PhD postdoctoral fellowship from the AUA Foundation.
After this fellowship, Dr. Bivalacqua joined the Brady faculty, where he became a leader in the field of both urologic oncology and sexual medicine. He studied new therapies for nerve regeneration following radical prostatectomy — research that led to discoveries in the field of peripheral nerve biology and highlighted the detrimental effects of neuroinflammation in autonomic nerve degeneration. For this work, he received the AUA's Rising Star Award.
Over the next few years, Dr. Bivalacqua's clinical and research practice shifted to focus on bladder cancer. He headed a translational research program in genitourinary cancers and tissue engineering using preclinical animal models of disease — in particular, transgenic mouse models of bladder cancer and of erectile dysfunction. The carcinogen model developed in the Bivalacqua lab led to the first preclinical model to study non-muscle invasive bladder cancer. Using this model, Dr. Bivalacqua's team developed novel intravesical therapies and developed a tissue-engineered conduit that may one day lead to the development of an artificial bladder.
More recently, Dr. Bivalacqua's laboratory genetically re-engineered Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) to over-express the "Stimulator of Interferon Genes" (STING) pathway, for which he was awarded both intramural and extramural research funding. This new therapeutic will soon be used in patients with BCG-unresponsive non-muscle invasive bladder cancer.
Board certified in urology, Dr. Bivalacqua sees patients at Penn Urology Perelman.