Clinical trials move the future of bladder cancer treatment forward, giving patients access to innovative therapies that may improve outcomes. Dr. Michael Poch, a urologic oncologist, reviews the latest breakthroughs in bladder cancer therapy, explains how treatment decisions are becoming more personalized, and shares why asking your healthcare team about clinical trial opportunities could be an important part of your care.
Dr. Michael Poch is a urologic oncologist specializing in bladder cancer and prostate cancer at Moffitt Cancer Center. Learn more about Dr. Poch.
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Transcript
Katherine Banwell:
What clinical trials are showing promise for people with bladder cancer?
Dr. Michael Poch:
I think that the most exciting thing for us is if we divide between those non-muscle invasive bladder cancer patients, and the muscle invasive and the metastatic. So, to pick the one in the middle, for those patients with muscle invasive bladder cancer, we’re sort of shifting now to using a combination of drugs called EV-Pembro or enfortumab vedotin-ejfv which is an antibody drug conjugate, and immunotherapy to help downstage tumors.
And what we’ve seen is a really significant shrinkage of those tumors for those patients that are getting neoadjuvant treatment. So, that has sort of changed our paradigm from using chemotherapy to using these antibody drug conjugate immunotherapy combinations. And as I said, I think that there’s a lot of new FDA approvals in the non-muscle invasive bladder cancer space. Again, using chemotherapy gels. Using adenoviral vectors. Chemotherapy delivery systems. So, there are a lot of different drugs that we can use. And I think that that is really important to have your urologist involved in that decision-making process because there’s no one size fits all for those. There’s no algorithm that says first you start with A, then you start with B with all these newer drugs. It’s really sort of a patient-driven and urologist-driven approach where we see what works for you. What was your previous history in terms of treatment?
Katherine Banwell:
Yeah. In terms of clinical trials, it’s important for patients and their care partners to ask their healthcare team what clinical trials might be available for them, right?
Dr. Michael Poch:
Absolutely. The only way we make progress in this space, and treat patients, and to treat our future patients is really to have patients participate in clinical trials.
So, the availability, the access I think is really important when we talk about how can we take care of our patients, but how can we take care of the future me. If I was in this position 10 years from now, we don’t make any progress without having patients enroll. And potentially seeing the real time benefit of that, as well.