Narayan on Complete Responses, Biomarkers, and Side Effects of Nadofaragene Treatment for NMIBC

Vikram Narayan, MD, touched on the findings from research published at the 21st Annual Meeting of the Society of Urologic Oncology in an interview with CancerNetwork. He spoke about complete responses, biomarkers and the side effect profile of nadofaragene to treat patients with non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC).

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I think in terms of what these studies show us is that it first shows us that nadofaragene when used in patients with BCGN-responsive disease does provide for a complete response rate in about half of patients. In those who achieve a complete response, its reasonably durable out to a year and there are very few recurrences thereafter. We’ve also potentially identified a biomarker that we can use to assess for treatment responses and potentially incorporate them into future studies.

Additionally, the other big finding is that the agent has a very favorable side effect profile with most patients primarily experiencing only temporary discomfort mostly related to urinary symptoms when the medication is administered. Only 4 patients in the entire study discontinued the drug due to side effects. This is significant because compared with pembrolizumab, which was the other agent which was an agent approved by the FDA earlier this year for the same indication, nadofaragene appears to have much less risk of toxicity and more importantly, it’s not a systemic agent meaning it’s not given intravenously. So, it may be of preference to patients who are trying to avoid some of those side effects.