Gopalkumar Iyer, MD, Author at Grand Rounds in Urology

Gopalkumar Iyer, MD

Gopakumar Iyer, MD, earned his MD at Vanderbilt University Medical School, completed a residency in internal medicine at the University of Michigan as well as a fellowship in medical oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Iyer is currently a genitourinary oncologist and early drug development specialist serving as the section head for bladder cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Iyer is a member of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Bladder Cancer Oncogenomics Project, a multidisciplinary effort to discover the key genetic abnormalities that drive this disease. He specializes in research in and treatment of patients with genitourinary cancers, including bladder, prostate, kidney, and testis cancers.

Dr. Iyer’s laboratory research focuses on defining the genetic aberrations that characterize bladder cancer, thereby identifying mutations that may serve as targets for novel therapies. Specifically, alterations within the PI3 kinase/Akt/mTOR pathway are commonly found in bladder cancer, and efforts to understand the biologic effects of pharmacologic inhibition of this pathway are underway. Loss of the TSC1 protein, a negative regulator of mTOR activation, has been shown to contribute to dramatic sensitivity of bladder tumors to everolimus therapy. He is working to elucidate the mechanisms underpinning drug sensitivity and defining the pattern of co-alterations with TSC1 loss in bladder cancer using next-generation sequencing techniques.

Talks by Gopalkumar Iyer, MD

Role of DNA Repair Mutations in Sensitivity to Cisplatin-based Chemotherapy

Posted by Gopalkumar Iyer, MD | Mar 2025

Gopalkumar Iyer, MD, explores the role of genomic alterations in predicting response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy for muscle-invasive bladder cancer.