It was the improvement in survival in people treated with the enfortumab and pembrolizumab combo-a doubling compared with chemotherapy-that received the greatest praise, even drawing a standing ovation during the presentation of the results at the ESMO meeting.ĭiscovering two treatments that improve survival for people with advanced bladder cancer “is monumental in our field,” said Andrea Apolo, M.D., of NCI’s Genitourinary Malignancies Branch.Īfter many failed attempts to improve upon chemotherapy, Dr. Researchers reported the results of both trials on October 22 at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) annual meeting in Madrid. In both trials, people treated with the new combination treatment lived longer than those who received chemotherapy-a never-before-seen improvement over the standard initial treatments for advanced bladder cancer.

Enfortumab is a type of treatment known as an antibody – drug conjugate. The second trial, called EV-302, compared the enfortumab –pembrolizumab combination with a standard chemotherapy regimen. In the first trial, known as CheckMate-901, patients received standard chemotherapy for advanced bladder cancer, either alone or in combination with the immunotherapy drug nivolumab (Opdivo), as initial treatment for advanced bladder cancer. Both studies included people whose bladder cancer had spread to other parts of the body or could not be removed by surgery, and both studies involved immunotherapy drugs. The findings mark a pivotal moment following years of little progress, according to several leading bladder cancer experts.

One treatment-the combination of enfortumab vedotin (Padcev) and the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab (Keytruda)-proved to be particularly powerful. For the first time in decades, people with advanced bladder cancer have more effective treatment options, according to results of two large clinical trials.

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