Bladder Cancer Research

The FDA has approved four immunotherapy drugs—avelumab, atezolizumab, durvalumab, and pembrolizumab—for the treatment of patients with bladder cancer. All four drugs belong to a class of cancer therapies known as checkpoint inhibitors.

The FDA has approved nivolumab for the treatment of unresectable locally advanced or metastatic bladder cancer that worsened after treatment with platinum-based chemotherapy.

The FDA has approved atezolizumab (Tecentriq®) for the treatment of some patients with urothelial carcinoma, the most common type of bladder cancer.

A new study has found that drinking water from private wells, particularly dug wells established during the first half of the 20th century, may have contributed to the elevated risk of bladder cancer that has been observed in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont for over 50 years.

Investigators with TCGA have identified new potential therapeutic targets for a major form of bladder cancer, including important genes and pathways that are disrupted in the disease. They also discovered that, at the molecular level, some subtypes of bladder cancer resemble subtypes of breast, head and neck and lung cancers, suggesting similar routes of development.

Patients who have inherited a specific common genetic variant develop bladder cancer tumors that strongly express a protein known as prostate stem cell antigen (PSCA), which is also expressed in many pancreatic and prostate tumors, according to research at the National Institutes of Health.

Researchers in the United Kingdom have found that adding chemotherapy to radiation therapy as a treatment for bladder cancer may reduce the risk of a recurrence more than radiation alone, without causing a substantial increase in side effects.