Bladder Cancer

Quality of care for patients being treated for urothelial carcinoma could be improved by having a multidisciplinary team treat the patient, says Robert Jones, M.D.

“It is not so much that the biology is changing; it’s that our knowledge of the biology is improving,” said Brant Inman, M.D.

After years with few advancements, five new agents were approved to treat bladder cancer within the last year. CURE spoke with Terence Friedlander, M.D. about the shifting treatment paradigm for patients with the disease.

Sumanta Kumar Pal, M.D., associate professor, Department of Medical Oncology, City of Hope, covered the scope of exciting genitourinary cancer data presented at the 2017 ESMO Congress, with a sharp focus on the CABOSUN and CheckMate-214 trials.

Immunotherapies known as checkpoint inhibitors are so promising in bladder cancer that many patients want them as first treatments — before they’ve been proven in that setting.

Keytruda (pembrolizumab) produced better overall survival (OS) rates than chemotherapy for patients with recurrent, advanced urothelial carcinoma.

Jonathan E. Rosenberg, M.D., discusses the implications of the new treatment guidelines for muscle-invasive bladder cancer.

Jeffrey Holzbeierlein, M.D., University of Kansas Medical Center, discusses how important it was that a multidisciplinary team came together to create the non-metastatic muscle-invasive bladder cancer guidelines.

Jonathan E. Rosenberg, M.D., medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses the new treatment guidelines for patients with non-metastatic muscle invasive bladder cancer.

Diane Zipursky Quale, co-founder of the Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network, discusses the importance of patients discussing their treatment options with their physician before undergoing surgery.

For patients with cisplatin-ineligible advanced urothelial cancer, frontline treatment with Keytruda (pembrolizumab) showed long-lasting response, according to updated phase 2 results from the KEYNOTE-052 trial.

Imfinzi (durvalumab) may change the treatment paradigm for some patients with urothelial carcinoma.

When used as a neoadjuvant therapy for patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC), split-dose of gemcitabine and cisplatin has a beneficial response and a high safety profile, according to a study presented at the 2017 American Urological Association Annual Meeting.

Combined modality treatment (CMT) could be considered a first course of treatment for patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer, according to the authors of a recent study published in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology.

When combined with the IDO1 inhibitor epacadostat, Keytruda (pembrolizumab), a PD-1 inhibitor, resulted in an overall response rate (ORR) of 35 percent in patients with advanced urothelial carcinoma, according to results from the phase 1/2 ECHO-202/KEYNOTE-037 trial.

According to results from the phase 3 RANGE trial, the addition of Cyramza (ramucirumab) to docetaxel resulted in improved progression-free survival for patients with previously treated locally advanced or unresectable or metastatic urothelial carcinoma.