Nivolumab (Opdivo) injection has received FDA approval for treating patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma (mUC) who have disease progression during or after platinum-containing chemotherapy or disease progression within 12 months of neoadjuvant or adjuvant treatment with platinum-containing chemotherapy.

In the CheckMate-275 phase 2 open-label trial, 53 (19.6%) of 270 of patients responded to treatment with nivolumab: 7 patients (2.6%) had a complete response and 46 patients (17%) had a partial response, according to a press release from Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, the maker of nivolumab. Among responders, the median time to response was 1.9 months and the median duration of response was 10.3 months.
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In the trial, patients received nivolumab 3 mg/kg intravenously every 2 weeks until disease progression or unacceptable toxicity. The recommended dose for mUC is 240 mg administered as an intravenous infusion over 60 minutes every 2 weeks until disease progression or unacceptable toxicity. The primary endpoint was objective response rate, as defined by an independent radiographic review committee.

Alterations in the extracellular matrix (ECM) microenvironment of the bladder, especially type I collagen, may contribute to bladder cancer progression, according to a new study.

Michael Brooks, MD, and collaborators at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston evaluated associations between mRNA expression of the COLI1A1 and COL1A2 genes—which encode type I collagen—with progression in a multi-center cohort of 189 patients with non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC). The cohort had a median age of 67 years and a median follow-up time of 4.8 years.

​High COL1A1 and COL1A2 mRNA expression was significantly associated with poor progression-free and overall survival, Dr Brooks' team reported online in Oncotarget. 

In an independent single-center cohort of 80 NMIBC patients, researchers conducted immunohistochemistry analyses of type I collagen protein expression and structure and found a significant association between type I collagen protein deposition and cancer progression. In particular, increased type I collagen protein expression near the tumor-ECM boundary was significantly associated with NMIBC progression, according to the investigators.

“Since type I collagen is one of the most abundant ECM components, these findings implicate a role for the stromal microenvironment in modulating invasive progression of NMIBC,” the researchers wrote. 

They concluded that their findings “will open avenues to future functional studies to investigate ECM-tumor interaction as a potential therapeutic intervention to treat NMIBCs.”