Genitourinary Cancers

Dr. Elizabeth Plimack discusses her 2018 AACR meeting presentation on recent advances in systemic therapy for bladder cancer.

Pembrolizumab offered stable or improved measures of global health status and quality of life compared with chemotherapy in patients with previously treated advanced urothelial cancer.

First-line combination therapy with the PD-L1 inhibitor avelumab and the VEGFR TKI axitinib yielded antitumor activity in previously untreated RCC.

The FDA has granted a Breakthrough Therapy designation to the antibody-drug conjugate enfortumab vedotin for patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial cancer.

Increases in resource use were not associated with improved survival or quality of care for patients with metastatic prostate cancer, but were associated with higher healthcare costs.

Proton radiation therapy offers some reduced toxicity over IMRT in patients under the age of 65 with prostate cancer, but its cost is nearly double.

The FDA is granting Priority Review for the expanded use of enzalutamide in nonmetastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer.

Differential methylation in CITED4, as measured in blood, appears to be a promising marker of bladder cancer susceptibility in women.

Abiraterone plus prednisolone/prednisone, or docetaxel, combined with ADT may be the most effective therapies for metastatic hormone-naive prostate cancer.

An 83-year-old man was diagnosed with multiple low-grade transitional cell carcinomas over a 6-year period. A surveillance cystoscopy in year 7 showed high-grade noninvasive papillary urothelial carcinoma in the bladder trigone. A CT urogram showed a soft-tissue mass with diffuse enhancement in the lower pole of the left kidney, concerning for malignancy.

The first article in this two-part series will provide an overview of both past and present therapeutic vaccination strategies for the promotion of antitumor immunity against prostate cancer.

Alterations to DDR genes were associated with improved outcomes in patients with metastatic urothelial carcinoma who were treated with immunotherapy.

In a large Chinese study, in certain RCC subgroups cancer-specific survival outcomes were better with partial rather than radical nephrectomy.

A meta-analysis was unable to find a conclusive relationship between physical activity and the risk of prostate cancer, though a reduced risk was suggested.

A large phase I trial offers further evidence that the anti–PD-L1 agent avelumab is generally well tolerated and results in relatively few serious adverse events.

Incorporating MRI-based parameters into a risk model could cut down on the number of unnecessary biopsies performed in patients with suspected prostate cancer.

The observed narrowing of racial disparities in prostate cancer outcome since the advent of PSA screening is not as large as previously believed.

The approval of the oral androgen-receptor inhibitor apalutamide (Erleada) is the first to be based on metastasis-free survival.

Pazopanib was not associated with prolonged progression-free survival compared with temsirolimus among patients with advanced clear-cell renal cell carcinoma, but a subgroup analysis of intermediate-risk patients offered some reason for optimism.

Adjuvant platinum-based chemotherapy is associated with delayed metastasis among patients diagnosed with upper-tract urothelial carcinoma, according to findings from the phase III POUT trial.

Adjuvant therapy with sunitinib after nephrectomy was associated with increased mortality among older women with renal cell carcinoma, according to a subgroup analysis of data from the ASSURE trial.

Combining axitinib and pembrolizumab is “safe and tolerable” among patients with previously untreated advanced renal cell carcinoma, with 73% of patients responding, according to findings from an open-label, phase Ib trial.

Fewer patients diagnosed with testicular cancer were uninsured, and fewer were diagnosed with late-stage disease, following the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid enrollment expansion.

Researchers reported promising safety data from an ongoing phase Ib/II clinical trial for SM-88, an investigational combination therapy that might one day offer an alternative to androgen deprivation therapy for men with recurrent, nonmetastatic prostate cancer.

Long-term follow-up showed that atezolizumab remained well tolerated over more than 3 years, with durable clinical benefit in metastatic urothelial carcinoma.