Comment: Immunotherapy plus chemotherapy in bladder cancer

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Published: 30 Sep 2019
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Dr Ignacio Duran - Hospital Universitario Virgen del Rocío, Sevilla, Spain

Dr Ignacio Duran comments on data from the IMvigor130 trial during a press conference at the 2019 ESMO congress.

This trial was evaluating first-line immunotherapy and chemotherapy instead of chemotherapy alone in patients with metastatic urothelial cancer.

Watch the press conference here.

Watch Dr Enrique Grande's interview with ecancer here

Read more about the study here

So to put this study into context just let me tell you that I think IMvigor 130 comes to answer a question that has been around for a number of years. This question is whether or not the addition of immunotherapy that came a few years ago as the new saviour, whether or not the addition of this treatment strategy to conventional chemotherapy would improve the outcomes in patients with metastatic urothelial cancer which is a very devastating disease.

We knew, it’s true that we knew that this combination of chemo plus immunotherapy had worked in other tumours so there was a lot of hope. I think what Dr Grande presented, I think it’s the first signal that suggests that probably adding immunotherapy to chemotherapy might work better than chemotherapy alone in a number of patients.

So it’s a very important signal that needs probably a little bit of maturity but we’re seeing a very powerful benefit in terms of progression free survival and a trend in terms of overall survival that we’ll need to confirm with time. So very striking data as well.