Daniel P. Petrylak, MD, Says Maintenance Immunotherapy Has Become Standard Practice in Bladder Cancer

At the 15th Annual Interdisciplinary Prostate Cancer Congress® and Other Genitourinary Malignancies, Daniel P. Petrylak, MD, spoke about how immunotherapy has influenced treatment for patients with bladder cancer.

CancerNetwork® spoke with Daniel P. Petrylak, MD, professor of medicine (medical oncology) and of urology and co-leader of Cancer Signaling Networks at Yale Cancer Center, about using maintenance immunotherapy as a standard of care for patients with bladder cancer. He spoke on the topic at the 15th Annual Interdisciplinary Prostate Cancer Congress® and Other Genitourinary Malignancies, hosted by Physicians’ Education Resource®, LLC (PER®), for which he served as meeting co-chair.

Transcript:

Immunotherapy is now considered standard of care for patients who respond to frontline chemotherapy for metastatic urothelial carcinoma. By respond, I define that as stable, complete, or partial response to chemotherapy, which could be either cisplatin and gemcitabine, carboplatin and gemcitabine, or the MVAC regimen [which includes methotrexate, vinblastine sulfate, doxorubicin hydrochloride, and cisplatin]. There’s a significant improvement in survival in those patients who receive maintenance of avelumab [Bavencio] compared with those who receive just best standard of care in that setting. We view that as standard treatment for these patients.

Related Videos
The risk of radionuclide exposure to the public reflects one reason urologists need to collaborate with radiation oncologists when administering radiopharmaceuticals to patients with prostate cancer.
Switching out beta emitters for alpha emitters, including radium-223, is one way to improve radiopharmaceutical treatment of prostate cancer, according to an expert from Weill Cornell Medicine.
Data demonstrate the feasibility of automated glomerular filtration rate prediction to decide between partial nephrectomy and radical nephrectomy in kidney cancer, according to an expert from the Cleveland Clinic.
Early phase trials investigating cellular therapies, bispecific antibodies, and antibody-drug conjugates for refractory kidney cancer may uncover strategies to overcome resistance mechanisms.
Increasing cancer antigen presentation as well as working with tumor cells in and delivering novel cells to the microenvironment may help in overcoming mechanisms of immune checkpoint inhibitor resistance in refractory renal cell carcinoma.
Lenvatinib plus pembrolizumab appears to be the best option for patients with refractory metastatic renal cell carcinoma who are progressing on immunotherapy combinations or are lenvatinib naïve.
Ipilimumab monotherapy does not appear effective in driving complete responses in refractory renal cell carcinoma despite yielding some progression-free survival intervals, according to an expert from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
An expert from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center discusses several phase 3 clinical trials supporting the use of various single-agent and combination immunotherapy regimens for advanced kidney cancer.
Shilpa Gupta, MD, shares the current standard of care for muscle-invasive bladder cancer and highlights other options that may be suitable for some patients.
An expert from Chase Comprehensive Cancer Center discusses how findings from a genomic analysis of the phase 2 BLASST-1 trial may identify biomarkers of response and resistance to nivolumab/chemotherapy in muscle-invasive bladder cancer.
Related Content