Dr. Grivas on Promising Combination Therapies in Bladder Cancer

Petros Grivas, MD, PhD, director, University of Washington Medicine’s Genitourinary Cancers Program, associate professor, oncology, University of Washington, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, discusses the agents with the greatest potential to extend the durability of immunotherapy in bladder cancer.

It is difficult to predict which combinations will reflect the highest response rates, explains Grivas. With that said, combinations of PD-L1 inhibitors and vaccines have garnered a lot of excitement in the field. At the University of Washington, an ongoing trial is looking at the frontline combination of a checkpoint inhibitor with a vaccine called CV301 in cisplatin-unfit patients.

Additionally, FGFR inhibitors are another class of agents that are likely to progress quickly through the pipeline. In March 2018, the novel pan-FGFR inhibitor erdafitinib was granted a breakthrough therapy designation for the treatment of patients with metastatic urothelial carcinoma. Subsequently, a new drug application with erdafitinib was submitted to the FDA in September 2018 for the treatment of patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma and FGFR genetic alterations whose tumors progressed following chemotherapy.