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“Patients who present with [node-positive nonmetastatic bladder cancer] have a poor prognosis and should be counseled as to the most appropriate treatment, empowering them in their decision making with the knowledge that bladder preservation is a real alternative to radical surgery,” the authors wrote.

“Although the future of AI within science is uncertain, disclosure of the use of AI is an excellent first step to balance academic integrity with disruptive innovation,” the authors write.

From urologic oncology and pediatric oncology to single port robotic surgery, the Department of Urology team is celebrating several achievements.

“Implementing Jelmyto earlier in real-world scenarios for LG-UTUC may offer appropriate low-risk patients the choice of minimal ablation or biopsy alone for renal preservation," says Hristos Z. Kaimakliotis, MD.

Patients receiving nivolumab plus cisplatin-based chemotherapy lived longer than patients treated with standard chemotherapy alone.

Awardees are being recognized for creative approaches to accelerating progress in bladder cancer research.

A response was observed in nearly two-thirds of cisplatin-ineligible patients with advanced urothelial cancer treated with enfortumab vedotin plus pembrolizumab in the first-line setting.

The Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network provides insight into the ongoing cisplatin shortage.

"Clinicians have opportunities to reduce patient subjective and objective financial burden if they continue to self-educate and communicate with patients and consider [financial toxicitiy] an adverse effect of treatment," write Alexandria A. Spellman, MD, MS, and Deborah R. Kaye, MD, MS.

5-year OS was similar between the cohorts, with a rate of 57% among patients who underwent RARC, compared with 55% among those who underwent ORC.

The investigators assessed data from the UNITE study, a retrospective study of patients treated with enfortumab vedotin and other agents.

“Our results suggest that bladder-sparing treatments may be a safe approach in selected patients. Survival outcomes were not inferior compared to early radical cystectomy," says Wei Shen Tan, MD.

"TAR-200 is a sort of a pretzel device. It's a novel drug delivery mechanism that's placed inside the bladder for sustained release of gemcitabine," explains Siamak Daneshmand, MD.

"The addition of an immune checkpoint inhibitor after tri- or tetra-modality therapy might improve long-term outcomes for patients with bladder cancer,” said Maria De Santis, MD.

Disitamab vedotin is a HER2-targeted antibody-drug conjugate and toripalimab is a PD1-inhibitor.

"The emulation framework lends the design and conduct of observational analyses some of the rigor required for the planning of a randomized trial. In doing so, it provides an innovative and principled approach to improve the evidence base on the comparative effectiveness of interventions," writes Boris Gershman, MD, and Aaron Fleishman, MPH.

"This is the first data to show that antegrade instillation of UGN-101 had lower ureteral stricture rates compared [with] retrograde approaches,” said Josh Gottlieb, DO.

In this episode, Ashish M. Kamat, MD, MBBS, highlights the state of bladder cancer care in recognition of Bladder Cancer Awareness Month.

Outstanding early-career researchers acknowledged for novel studies to enhance the well-being of patients with bladder cancer.

The investigators found that patients who experienced recurrence following BCG therapy were more likely to have BRS3 tumors compared with BRS1 or BRS2.

The intravesical drug delivery system TAR-210 is designed to provide localized continuous release of erdafitinib in patients with bladder cancer.

The 5-year metastasis-free survival rate was 75% with trimodality therapy vs 74% with radical cystectomy.

Increasing numbers of older patients with cancer necessitates adoption of an age-friendly approach to cancer care.

"With intravesical chemotherapy, there aren't the side effects we see with intravenous chemotherapy because the drugs only treat the bladder lining and very little, if any, of the medicine gets absorbed in the bloodstream," said Nitin Yerram, MD.

In the study, 69% of patients who underwent complete ablation had no visible disease at first endoscopic evaluation, compared with 40% of patients who underwent chemoablation therapy.

Of all malignant bladder cancer lesions, 28% were only identified with blue light.

“The medication is given once a week for 6 weeks. It is an outpatient procedure with general anesthesia. And it is typically covered by insurance,” said Joseph Brito, MD.

"What was great about this partnership is we recognized that this is going to be the future of medicine at some point, and we want to be able to be a part of that cutting edge technology," says Nitin K. Yerram, MD.

The FDA has issued a complete response letter to ImmunityBio regarding its biologics license application for N-803 (Anktiva) for use in combination with BCG for the treatment of patients with non–muscle-invasive bladder cancer.

"Proxies for social determinants of health that we found to be associated with higher overall mortality included living in a more deprived area, as well as having Medicaid or Medicare insurance," says David Miller, MD.