Perioperative Checkpoint Inhibition Better for Muscle-Invasive Bladder Cancer

Patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer experienced “clinically meaningful” improvements in key outcomes—event-free survival and overall survival—when the immune checkpoint inhibitor durvalumab was added to their standard neoadjuvant chemotherapy. This was in research findings, reported at the ESMO Congress 2024, from the NIAGARA randomized Phase Ill trial of neoadjuvant durvalumab plus chemotherapy followed by radical cystectomy and adjuvant durvalumab in patients with cisplatin-eligible muscle-invasive bladder cancer. After his talk at the ESMO Barcelona conference, first author Thomas Powles, MBBS, MRCP, MD, from the Barts Cancer Institute at Queen Mary University of London, UK, met up with Oncology Times correspondent Peter Goodwin.