(UroToday.com) The 2024 Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network (BCAN) Bladder Cancer Think Tank held in San Diego, CA was host to a 2022 and 2021 Bladder Cancer Research Innovation Awardees session. Dr. Tyler Curiel presented the results of an analysis evaluating rationally engineered IL-2 for the enhanced treatment of local and metastatic bladder cancer.

(UroToday.com) The 2024 Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network (BCAN) Bladder Cancer Think Tank held in San Diego, CA was host to an interactive patient advocate-centered session addressing treatment options, concerns, and survivorship issues in a bladder cancer patient’s journey. This session was paneled by Drs. Roger Li and Mary Beth Westerman, and were joined by the following BCAN patient advocates:

(UroToday.com) The 2024 Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network (BCAN) Bladder Cancer Think Tank held in San Diego, CA was host to a 2022 and 2021 Bladder Cancer Research Innovation Awardees session. Dr. John Lee discussed his lab’s research efforts for identifying both genetic determinants and vulnerabilities of histologic variants of bladder cancer.

(UroToday.com) The 2024 Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network (BCAN) Bladder Cancer Think Tank held in San Diego, CA was host to an interactive patient advocate-centered session addressing treatment options, concerns, and survivorship issues in a bladder cancer patient’s journey. After the BCAN patient advocates shared their bladder cancer journeys, Dr. Mary Beth Westerman provided an overview of contemporary surveillance regimens and tools for bladder cancer patients.

(UroToday.com) The 2024 Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network (BCAN) Bladder Cancer Think Tank held in San Diego, CA was host to a BCAN 2023 Patient Centered Clinical Young Investigator Awardee session. Dr. Kathryn Gessner presented the results of a study dissecting the impact of E-cadherin loss on the immune microenvironment and response to immune checkpoint blockade in plasmacytoid urothelial carcinoma.

(UroToday.com) The 2024 Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network (BCAN) Bladder Cancer Think Tank held in San Diego, CA between August 7^th and 9^th, 2024 was host to a BCAN 2023 Patient-Centered Clinical Young Investigator Awardee session. Dr. Sean Clark-Garvey presented his group’s work exploring Fibroblast Growth Factor 3 (FGFR3) inhibition as a sensitizing agent to Nectin-4 antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) therapy in urothelial carcinoma.

(UroToday.com) The 2024 Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network (BCAN) Bladder Cancer Think Tank held in San Diego, CA between August 7th and 9th, 2024 was host to an implementation science session that addressed bridging evidence generation to practice in bladder cancer care.

(UroToday.com) The 2024 Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network (BCAN) Bladder Cancer Think Tank held in San Diego, CA was host to an implementation science session that addressed bridging evidence generation to practice in bladder cancer care. Dr. Marc Bjurlin provided an overview of smoking cessation implementation efforts for patients with bladder cancer.

(UroToday.com) The 2024 Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network (BCAN) Bladder Cancer Think Tank held in San Diego, CA was host to a BCAN 2023 Patient Centered Clinical Young Investigator Awardee session. Dr. Rishi Sekar, the Patient-Centered Clinical Research Young Investigator Awardee, discussed his work evaluating individual and community-level drivers of disparities in bladder cancer clinical trials participation.

(UroToday.com) The 2024 Society of Nuclear Medicine & Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) annual meeting featured a session on prostate cancer, and a presentation by Dr. Louise Emmett discussing response assessment in radiopharmaceutical therapies for prostate cancer. Dr. Emmett started her presentation by noting that for patients with high PSMA SUVmean (quartile 4), PSA50 response rate to ¹⁷⁷Lu PSMA is excellent (89%). However, for those patients with low SUVmean (quartile 1) there is relatively poor ¹⁷⁷Lu PSMA PSA50 response rates (29%), but which are reasonable with cabazitaxel (43%):

(UroToday.com) The 2024 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting featured a session on prostate cancer, and a presentation by Dr. Philip Sutera discussing the validation of a digital pathology-based multimodal artificial intelligence model in oligometastatic castration-sensitive prostate cancer (CSPC). Oligometastatic CSPC is a state of limited metastatic disease, and randomized trials have demonstrated improvements in progression-free survival in patients with oligometastatic CSPC treated with metastasis-directed therapy. However, clinical outcomes remain heterogeneous and response to metastasis-directed therapy is variable, raising the need for prognostic/predictive biomarkers. A multimodal artificial intelligence biomarker (ArteraAI Prostate Test) was recently trained using data from patients with localized prostate cancer and found to be prognostic.^1,2 The multimodal architecture is composed of two parts: (i) a tower stack to parse a variable number of digital histopathology slides, and (ii) another tower stack to merge the resultant features and predict binary outcomes:

(UroToday.com) The 2024 Society of Nuclear Medicine & Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) annual meeting featured a session on prostate cancer, and the Barry Siegel Award Lecture presentation by Dr. Steven Rowe discussing registrational trials for PSMA PET. Dr. Rowe started his presentation highlighting that PSMA is a transmembrane carboxypeptidase highly expressed on prostate cancer cells with frequent expression observed in prostate cancer tumors. Furthermore, there has been direct correlation between expression levels and tumor aggressive. What we know so far about PSMA PET is that it has (i) moderate sensitivity and very high specificity for preoperative nodal staging, (ii) high detection efficiency for sites of biochemical recurrence, and (iii) effective for guiding focal therapy and selecting patients for PSMA-based therapeutic molecules. ¹⁸F-DCFPyL in high risk prostate cancer patients can have vastly different staging results:

(UroToday.com) The 2024 Society of Nuclear Medicine & Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) annual meeting featured a session on prostate cancer, and a presentation by Dr. Raghava Karri discussing the prognostic value of post-therapy SPECT/CT imaging in patients undergoing ¹⁷⁷Lu-PSMA-617 (Lu-PSMA) radioligand therapy. Despite established efficacy of Lu-PSMA, as evidenced by the TheraP¹ and VISION² trials, there remains a notable gap in understanding the utility of post-therapy imaging. At the 2024 SNMMI annual meeting, Dr. Karri and colleagues reviewed changes on post-therapy SPECT/CT as a prognostic biomarker compared to PSA and conventional prognostic parameters in three clinical trials.