BackTable Urology
Ep. 193 Bladder Cancer Innovations: ESMO 2024 Highlights with Dr. Andrea Apolo
Tue, 08 Oct 2024
Catch up on the latest breakthroughs in bladder cancer management. In this episode of the BackTable Urology Podcast, Dr. Bogdana Schmidt (University of Utah) speaks with Dr. Andrea Apolo, a medical oncologist at the National Cancer Institute, about recent advancements in bladder cancer treatment presented at the 2024 European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress. --- SYNPOSIS They review pivotal trials like the NIAGARA and AMBASSADOR studies, the TAR-200 drug delivery system, the use of bladder-sparing treatment, and the role of ctDNA as a biomarker. Further, they detail the effectiveness of systemic therapies such as gemcitabine and pembrolizumab, the implications of perioperative immunotherapy, and the future role of antibody-drug conjugates. The conversation highlights the trend towards less invasive approaches while improving survival rates from bladder cancer. --- TIMESTAMPS 00:00 - Introduction 03:49 - NIAGARA Trial 09:10 - Challenges in Bladder Cancer Treatment 18:56 - AMBASSADOR Trial 25:30 - Adjuvant Immunotherapy 29:30 - Exploring Biomarkers and ctDNA 36:34 - Surgery and Less Invasive Therapies 46:31 - Future Directions in Bladder Cancer Treatment --- RESOURCES ESMO https://www.esmo.org/
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I'm actually excited about the TAR system. The TAR 200 is with gemcitabine, but I'm excited about the whole device and the way that you can deliver it into the bladder so easily. And it delivers a slow amount of drug into the bladder. I love that. And the possibility that you can put other drugs.
active therapies in there so i'm really excited about it and i think we do need something that kind of manages the bladder right so we have these great systemic therapies but although most patients when they're responding to systemic therapies also respond within the bladder it'd be nice to have an additional intensification of treatment in the bladder potentially in the future to have bladder sparing approaches and this may be a way of doing it intensifying
treatment with these tar systems and then leaving the bladder intact.
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Backtable podcast, your source for all things urology. You can find all previous episodes of our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at backtable.com. My name is Bogdana Schmidt, and it is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Andrea Apollo.
She's a tenured senior investigator, medical oncologist, and acting deputy chief of the Geomalignancies Branch and head of the Bladder Cancer Center at the NIH. She's led numerous GU clinical trials, including one we'll be discussing today. Dr. Apollo, welcome to the Backtable podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
We'll be discussing highlights specifically in the bladder cancer field presented at ESMO 2024 in beautiful Barcelona. Before we get into it, I just want to point out how alive our field is right now. The meeting had over 5,000 abstracts submitted, over 600 invited speakers, but what I found fascinating was the statistics on the number of trials going on in GU right now.
In my very young urologic oncology life, this is still incredibly impressive. There are currently 351 active trials in RCC, 188 in prostate cancer, and 929 in bladder cancer. This is unbelievable.
Yeah, this is this to me, it's like a dream come true. So we've always given patients platinum based chemotherapy for bladder cancer with really not that impressive results. But, you know, we've done a lot of trials and we really struggle to do better than platinum based chemotherapy. And now we're doing this in the metastatic setting and we're bringing it to the perioperative setting.
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