Bladder Cancer

Thomas W. Flaig, MD, discusses the latest updates to the NCCN guidelines for the treatment of patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer. In addition, he highlights the latest approvals of checkpoint inhibitors in this patient population.

The healthcare community is still awaiting a response from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to the opposition of the agency’s proposal to substantially revise the Medicare Part D protected drug classes.

Overtreating men 70 years or older with prostate cancer cost Medicare more than $1.2 billion from 2004 to 2007, according to the results of a retrospective study using the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results–Medicare linked database.

Ongoing research seeks to boost objective response rates in urothelial cancer by developing biomarkers to predict which immune checkpoint inhibitors a patient is most likely to respond to and by testing these in combination with each other and other treatment types to increase both the number and duration of responses.

Arlene O. Siefker-Radtke, MD, discusses the data seen with sacituzumab govitecan, an antibody-drug conjugate that targets TROP-2, which is expressed frequently in urothelial cancer cells.

Scott T. Tagawa, MD, discusses the potential of sacituzumab govitecan in advanced urothelial cancers and reflected on progress made in prostate cancer.

Shilpa Gupta, MD, discusses the progress over the last few years in bladder cancer.

The combination of lenvatinib plus pembrolizumab induced responses in a quarter of patients with urothelial carcinoma, according to the results of a small study presented at the 2019 ASCO-SITC Clinical Immuno-Oncology Symposium. The immunotherapy/targeted therapy combination also demonstrated a manageable toxicity profile.

Bempegaldesleukin, a novel interleukin-2 therapy, showed promising activity when combined with nivolumab in patients with metastatic urothelial carcinoma who were cisplatin ineligible or refused standard therapy, according to preliminary data from the PIVOT-02 study.

According to findings from an open-label, single-arm phase I/II basket study presented during the 2019 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium, 14 of 45 patients with relapsed/refractory metastatic urothelial cancer demonstrated an objective response to sacituzumab govitecan, for an objective response rate of 31.1%.

Petros Grivas, MD, PhD, discusses the rapidly evolving locally advanced and metastatic bladder cancer field.

Jonathan L. Wright, MD, MS, FACS, highlighted the available therapies for patients with localized muscle-invasive bladder cancer.

Arjun V. Balar, MD, discusses a few approaches for incorporating immunotherapy treatments into the frontline for patients with bladder cancer.

General Cancer

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy with a dose-dense, or accelerated, course of methotrexate, vinblastine, doxorubicin, and cisplatin was more likely to produce a complete pathologic response and extend overall survival than any other chemotherapy regimen in patients with bladder cancer treated with cystectomy, according to a study published in <em>JAMA Oncology</em>.

Joaquim Bellmunt, MD, PhD, shares his recommendation in how to manage the side effects of immunotherapy as a monotherapy, particularly PD-1/PD-L1, in patients with bladder cancer.

This week the FDA granted a fast track designation to the novel targeted therapy vofatamab for the treatment of patients with advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma who harbor an <em>FGFR3 </em>alteration, according to Rainier Therapeutics, the company developing vofatamab.

Joaquim Bellmunt, MD, PhD, discusses recent immunotherapy advancements in bladder cancer and what future research will look like.

UroGen has announced topline findings from the&nbsp;ongoing phase III OLYMPUS trial, in which the investigational mitomycin formulation UGN-101 (mitomycin gel) demonstrated a 57% complete response rate in patients with&nbsp;low-grade upper-tract urothelial cancer.

Joaquim Bellmunt, MD, PhD, discusses the impact of immunotherapy compared to chemotherapy as treatment of patients with bladder cancer.

A randomized phase II trial found that both fluorouracil plus cisplatin and twice-daily radiation and gemcitabine plus once-daily radiation achieved freedom from distant metastasis at 3 years in at least 75% of patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer.

Thomas Powles, MBBS, MRCP, MD,&nbsp;discusses recent changes to the frontline landscape of bladder cancer and where research should focus moving forward.