Ep. 193 Bladder Cancer Innovations: ESMO 2024 Highlights with Dr. Andrea Apolo
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This week on the Backtable Podcast.
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. So I think it's a really exciting time where we can actually play around with the therapies that we have in terms of designing clinical trials and find the best treatment options for patients and hopefully in the future, spare their bladder and improve their overall survival, which is really the goal.
Absolutely. And I think that goal actually is reachable. You know, when I started even just a few years ago, I used to tell patients, look, if we're still doing the same thing in bladder cancer 10 years from now, we haven't done our jobs. And even in the last few years, we've made such interesting and promising advances that I'm really hopeful we'll get there. So I wasn't sure the best way to organize this chat. So I think maybe we should start with the most advanced, most likely to be practice changing abstract, and then spend some time on things that are interesting and thought provoking, maybe not quite prime time. But I definitely want to get your thoughts on where you think the field is heading and what you'll be looking forward to in future meetings. So with that in mind, let's jump into the Niagara trial presented to Dr. Tom Powell's.
Yeah, so I was so excited to see the results of this study, especially after last year, we saw the really exciting results of EV plus PEMBRO in the metastatic setting. And then we saw the Checkmate 901 data, where when nivolumab was added to GEMSYS, it did better than just GEMSYS alone. And that just kind of set the stage for the perioperative trials that are
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