Moving Newer Agents Up Earlier in Advanced Bladder Cancer

This year’s Genitourinary Cancers Symposium featured multiple studies on established therapies and drugs in development for bladder cancer.

In this exclusive video, Daniel P. Petrylak, MD, professor of medicine and urology at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, discusses the combination of enfortumab vedotin (Padcev) and pembrolizumab (Keytruda) in locally advanced or metastatic disease.

Following is a transcript of his remarks:

There’s been a lot of exciting data generated with the combination of enfortumab and pembrolizumab. And I think that one of the highest median survivals reported in a single-arm study of 27 months has been reported in the cohort A of the trial that evaluated pembrolizumab and enfortumab in patients who are ineligible to receive cisplatin-based chemotherapy.

So there’s a randomized trial that is being performed looking at this particular question of enfortumab/pembro versus standard-of-care chemotherapy, and that also includes cisplatin-based chemotherapy as well.

So I think that the exciting things that are moving forward are that we’re moving these newer agents up earlier, and patients may have potentially more benefit, particularly since we know that there’s a very high rate of response in visceral disease with the combination of enfortumab and pembrolizumab, as well as enfortumab alone.

So I think the future’s very, very bright, and now I think we are tasked with the issue of trying to figure out how to sequence these drugs properly.