Systemic therapy for bladder cancer, both localized muscle-invasive disease and metastatic disease, has seen minimal progress over the past two decades. Current approaches rely upon cytotoxic chemotherapy combinations aimed at increasing cure rates or achieving palliation and disease control, but these regimens are fraught with short-and long-term toxicities and outcomes remain suboptimal. The emergence of systemic immunotherapies that can provide durable remissions in subsets of patients with other malignancies has the potential to transform the field, and early phase trials have begun to demonstrate activity in some patients with metastatic bladder cancer. In this article, we review the current state of systemic therapy for bladder cancer and discuss the current literature and ongoing trials utilizing various immunotherapies.
KEYWORDS• bladder cancerCancers of the urinary bladder are the sixth most commonly diagnosed malignancy in the USA and the most prevalent malignancy of the GI tract, with 74,000 new cases estimated from 2015 [1]. The predominant histologic subtype is urothelial carcinoma (UC), which accounts for more than 90% of diagnoses in the western world. For patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) confined to the bladder and deemed surgical candidates, radical cystectomy (RC) with pelvic lymphadenectomy remains the gold standard, with bladder preservation techniques using combinations of radiation therapy (RT) and systemic therapy receiving increased attention [2][3][4][5]. Local therapy with surgery or radiation alone is suboptimal, with median overall survival (OS) ranging from 1.8 to 3.8 years and 5-year survival of only 43% after RC and less than 40% with RT, with the majority of deaths related to distant disease [6,7]. The addition of neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) has significantly improved outcomes. For patients who present with metastatic disease, systemic chemotherapy with cisplatin-based regimens, long recognized as an active drug in this disease, is accepted as the standard of care. Thus, systemic therapy is an integral component of treatment for patients with UC, yet despite tremendous advances across a multitude of malignant conditions, no new therapies have entered the armamentarium in over decade. Fortunately, recent and ongoing research in the burgeoning field of cancer immunotherapy (IT) offers hope that new agents will finally demonstrate survival benefits in clinical trials. In this article, we review the definitive studies that have established the current standards of care for systemic treatment in UC, then focus on new and future trials aiming to bring the systemic treatment of UC into the IT age.For reprint orders, please contact: reprints@futuremedicine.com