Bladder cancer treatment is evolving rapidly with more options available today than ever before. Dr. Michael Poch shares an overview of the latest FDA-approved therapies, promising clinical trial developments, and emerging treatment approaches that are improving outcomes for patients with both early-stage and advanced bladder cancer.
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:
Can you share the latest updates for treatment for people with bladder cancer?
Dr. Michael Poch:
There’s a lot of stuff going on. It’s a great question. Ten years ago, we didn’t have a lot of clinical trials going on.
And now, there’s been an explosion of clinical trials. An explosion of FDA approvals for treatment of bladder cancer. So again, going back to the idea of using stage and grade to help us define how we’re going to treat, for those patients that don’t have cancer in the muscle layer of the bladder, we consider those patients either stage zero or stage I. There have been a number of FDA-approved drugs to treat patients. Typically, right now, what we’re seeing is in the BCG unresponsive or BCG exposed area where we’ve got drugs to treat after initial therapy for intermediate or high-risk bladder cancers that have returned.
And those drugs are either chemotherapy gels that are into the bladder. Those are some drugs that increase the effectiveness of BCG. There are also new delivery mechanisms for delivering chemotherapy into patients’ bladders. So, there are a number of new treatments.
FDA-approved treatments for the treatment of non-muscle-based bladder cancer. In addition, this year and last year, there have been a lot of positive results for treatment of patients with metastatic disease using antibody drug conjugates and in combination with immunotherapy, or chemotherapy plus immunotherapy.
And so, both in the metastatic setting and now in the muscle invasive bladder cancer setting where we can treat patients systematically before bladder removal surgery, and have really good outcomes with those patients, as well. So, there’s a lot of stuff going on right now.