Bladder cancer therapies, once very limited, now offer more options to treat patients than ever before. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute's Bladder Cancer Director, Guru Sonpavde, MD, details new treatments and research initiatives on the horizon for bladder cancer.
bladder cancer patients with more options than ever before. For years, platinum based chemotherapy was the only drug treatment option. Then immunotherapy drugs were approved either for metastatic bladder cancer after chemotherapy or for certain patients who couldn't receive chemotherapy in the first place. Now there are even more new therapies. First came LDA Fitness. This is an oral drug that blocks a protein called F G F R. It is specifically approved in post platinum patients as salvage treatment in patients that had us with mutations or fusions in the genes F g f r three or F G far too. Dr. Guru. Some paved leads the Bladder Cancer Treatment Center at Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He says only about 15 to 20% of patients have the F G F R three or F G f R two tumor mutations, so other treatment options are also being researched. We have a new drug called Info Tema with Dalton. This is an antibody drug conjugate, which has been approved in patients that are progressing with metastatic carcinoma, post platinum based chemotherapy and, uh, immunotherapy drugs like a pity well, nor pd L one in the middle. So essentially a third line treatment or beyond. So that is a welcome addition to the therapeutic government area. Because historically we had chemotherapy like taxis that have been used in this space, which are not very active, which induced responses in patients in a around 10 to 15% of patients, as opposed to end for tomorrow, we've gotten, which induces responses to nearly 45% of patients, Dr San Poverty says. Another new drug approval is for an immunotherapy drug called temporal is a mob, which previously was approved for metastatic disease but now is also approved in the non muscle invasive bladder cancer space. And he says, research continues trying to identify even more effective drug combinations and identify exactly at which point they should be administered. There's other new drugs on the horizon. There's other spaces where these drugs are being looked at, like the new adieu in pre operative space and also similarly in the graduate space post radical suspect. To me, we are looking at different period, one period one inhibitors
