Comprehensive Bladder Preservation Therapy on Patients With Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer

• Status: Not yet recruiting
• Trial end date: 2025-09-01

Summary

Nowadays, Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor (ICI) has become one of the new drugs for the treatment of advanced uroepithelial carcinoma. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved ICI for bladder cancer (BC) patients who cannot tolerate cisplatin chemotherapy and whose tumors express programmed cell death protein ligand-1 (PD-L1). However, the efficacy of ICI in bladder preservation therapy for muscular invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) is unknown.

With the progressive clinical confirmation of the efficacy of immunotherapy, ICI has moved from second-line to first-line treatment in the indication of advanced unresectable BC. It even has been used in the neoadjuvant and postoperative adjuvant therapy for MIBC and non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC) where Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) therapy has failed. Available studies have shown that neoadjuvant immunotherapy can achieve a pathological complete response (pCR) of 31%-42% for MIBC, regardless of using a single drug or combination, which is higher than that of neoadjuvant chemotherapy, and the incidence of side effects associated with neoadjuvant immunotherapy is lower than that of neoadjuvant chemotherapy, providing an effective treatment option for cisplatin-intolerant patients.

Studies have shown that radiotherapy leads to immunogenic cell death, which results in the release and presentation of tumor antigens and directs the recruitment and activation of T cells. It also induces increased expression of PD-L1 in tumor cells, which in turn improves the efficacy of immunotherapy. Thus ICI combined with radiotherapy has a synergistic antitumor effect and does not produce serious toxic side effects similar to those associated with chemotherapeutic agents.

This study proposes a novel neoadjuvant immunotherapy-based integrated bladder preservation therapy (neoadjuvant immunotherapy + TURBT + postoperative adjuvant radiotherapy combined with immunotherapy) and investigates the effectiveness and safety of this strategy in bladder preservation treatment strategy.

• Phase: Phase 2

Details

• Lead Sponsor: First Affiliated Hospital Xi'an Jiaotong University
• Collaborator: BeiGene