Dr. Konety on future directions in the management of bladder cancer

In this video, Badrinath Konety, MD, MBA, discusses potential future advances in the bladder cancer space. Konety is the president of Allina Health Cancer Institute in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Video Transcript:

I think for non-muscle invasive bladder cancer, particularly in the group that is BCG unresponsive, I think we're going to continue to see a couple more approvals. I mentioned a couple of them. There are a few others that are in the pipeline. Unfortunately, one of them didn't go through, we'll see what happens. There are some issues that they have to resolve. There's another potential gene therapy, CG0070. That's also showing great promise in trials. So, I think there'll be a few other treatments for more advanced disease, there may be some checkpoint inhibitor therapies that are usable intravesically. We've all looked at systemic, let's see what it does intravesically, it may do something else. We're working on potentially launching a trial, or working with a company to launch a potential trial sometime later this year, early next year, for an oral agent that may be helpful in this patient population.

There's going to be other approaches to enhanced endoscopy, Flexible Blue Light, and those kinds of things; I think [there is] going to be greater adoption with newer technologies coming in. Whether it's just with Blue Light, or with other agents, or even non-agent based just digital imaging, I think it's going to get much more enhanced and better diagnostics and discovery diagnostics. There continues to be immense interest in urinary markers for bladder cancer. Most of these are genetically driven, some composite of phenotypic factors and genotypic factors, and some algorithmic assessment of risk. I think that'll continue to be a hot topic, but there's so many companies that are in that space right now. We're also in early stages of talks with a company that looks at non-ablative ultrasound-based approaches. There's different ways to ablate bladder tumors, and can we do targeted ablation of some sort? So, we are trying to start thinking about some studies in that area.

This transcription has been edited for clarity.