Genitourinary Cancers Symposium

Donna Hansel, MD, PhD, of University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, explains her use of human bladder cancer cells in her research.

Funding is the biggest challenge scientists and clinical investigators face when trying to find successful therapies to treat advanced bladder cancer, explained Donna Hansel, MD, PhD, of University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine.

New therapies and imaging modalities have helped providers treat patients who have prostate cancer earlier, said Joe O'Sullivan, MD, FRCR, clinical professor, School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences, Queen's University Belfast.

Having numerous therapies to treat prostate cancer can actually be a bad thing—it makes it difficult to design clinical trials for new therapies coming into the space, explained Joe O'Sullivan, MD, FRCR, clinical professor, School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences, Queen's University Belfast.

Physicians using molecular therapies need to be educated on where the therapies are best used during treatment, and patients need to understand that the radiation is safe for those around them, said Joe O'Sullivan, MD, FRCR, clinical professor, School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences, Queen's University Belfast.

mTOR is a very promising pathway because it’s so central in growth, migration, and survival of bladder cancer cells, explained Donna Hansel, MD, PhD, chief, anatomic pathology, UC San Diego.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) really makes a difference when studying men who’ve had a negative prostate biopsy, but their prostate-specific antigen goes up overtime or something changes and there’s a continuing concern for prostate cancer, said Christopher Kane, MD, professor of urology, University of California, San Diego.

There is a greater overall survival benefit for patients with recurrent urothelial cancer being treated with pembrolizumab versus chemotherapy, according to long-term results of the KEYNOTE-045 trial.

In prostate cancer, we're using combinations by looking to see how 1 drug may trigger an immune infiltrate or proteins that allow the tumor to resist the monotherapy, said Sumit Subudhi, MD, PhD, genitourinary medical oncology, MD Anderson Cancer Center.

The addition of docetaxel to first-line long-term hormone therapy in patients with prostate cancer is associated with improved quality of life (QoL) benefits and cost effectiveness, according to study results presented at the 2018 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium.

There was a reduced rate of uninsured patients at the time of diagnosis and a shift to earlier stage at time of diagnosis for patients with testicular cancer in states that adopted Medicaid expansion in 2014, according to findings presented at the 2018 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium.

Daily image-guided radiotherapy, when compared to weekly control, decreases the risk of recurrence and rectal toxicity, but is associated with an increased risk of second cancer, according to study results presented at the 2018 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium.

Robotic procedures have really exploded in prostate cancer, said Christopher Kane, MD, professor of urology, University of California, San Diego. Robotic radical prostatectomy is now the most common way a radical prostatectomy is done in the United States.

During a session at the 2018 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium, Peter Black, MD, professor, department of urologic sciences, University of British Columbia, discussed using molecular subtypes, the Coxen model, and gene mutations to select patients and therapies for neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

During a session at the 2018 Genitourinay Cancers Symposium, Abhishek Solanki, MD, MS, assistant professor, radiation oncology, Loyola University of Chicago discussed the role of immunotherapy in patients undergoing radiation therapy for bladder cancer.

With new guidelines on how to treat and manage muscle-invasive bladder cancer, Jeffrey Holzbeierlein, MD, FACS, professor of urology, director of urologic oncology, interim chair of the department of urology, University of Kansas Health System, provided insight into how the guidelines have changed the management of the disease at the 2018 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium.

During a session at the 2018 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium, 2 doctors debate whether there is existing evidence for local treatment for patients newly diagnosed with metastatic disease.

For the first time, molecular therapies, such as radium-223, provide a survival-prolonging agent for men with advanced prostate cancer affecting the bone, explained Joe O'Sullivan, MD, FRCR, clinical professor, School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences, Queen's University Belfast.

Osteomimicry may contribute to the uptake of radium-223 within bone metastases and may subsequently enhance the therapeutic benefit of radium-223, according to an abstract presented by Andrew Armstrong, MD, associate professor of medicine, Duke University School of Medicine, at the 2018 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium.

Apalutamide significantly improved median metastasis-free survival by 2 years in men with nonmetastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer (nmCRPC), according to study results presented by Eric Jay Small, MD, MD, FASCO, chief of the division of hematology and oncology in the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), deputy director of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, and professor in residence in the Department of Medicine and Department of Urology, at the 2018 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium.