Bladder Cancer Targeted Therapy

March 19, 2020

As researchers learn more about the DNA changes and proteins that drive bladder cancer, they are better able to design treatments that target them. New therapies can target the proteins that control how cancer cells grow, divide, and spread.  Identifying these changes can help doctors provide the right treatment to the right patient, based on the individual patients’ characteristics and the genomics or genomic alterations associated with their bladder cancer tumor.

Fibroblast growth factor receptors (FGFRs) are a group of proteins on bladder cancer cells that can help them grow. In some bladder cancers, the cells have changes in FGFR genes (which control how much of the FGFR proteins are made). The first approved therapy targets cells with FGFR gene changes (called FGFR inhibitors) and can help treat some people with bladder cancer. This FGFR inhibitor, erdafitinib, can be used to treat locally advanced or metastatic bladder cancer that has certain changes in the FGFR2 or FGFR3 gene, that is still growing after treatment with chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is the standard of care recommended by the treatment guidelines for most patients with locally advanced or metastatic bladder cancer.

Much of our knowledge about precision medicine and bladder cancer, comes from early research on The Cancer Genome Atlas Project (TCGA). Learn more  from a presentation by Drs. Seth Lerner and Gopa Iyer about Precision Medicine, Genomics and Bladder Cancer.