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| Image credit Terese Winslow via Cancer.gov |
The trial involving 108 patients showed that the time before their type of bladder cancer called urothelial cancer progressed was 60 percent longer when they received the immunotherapy drug called pembrolizumab (Keytruda®) after platinum-based chemotherapy compared to patients who received a placebo after chemotherapy.
The approach is called switch maintenance immunotherapy which means using alternative agents that were not used in initial treatment. In this case patients received pembrolizumab, which causes the immune system to a produce T cells that attack cancer.
"This trial, along with another recent study testing a similar approach, bolster the use of switch maintenance treatment, which will likely become a standard of care for metastatic urothelial cancer, a disease characterized by a paucity of advances in decades," said lead author Matthew Galsky, MD, Co-Director of the Center of Excellence for Bladder Cancer at Mount Sinai.
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