AstraZeneca announced Thursday that their cancer treatment Imfinzi demonstrated meaningful survival benefits for bladder cancer patients when used alongside a targeted medication before surgical procedures, according to results from a late-stage clinical trial.
The pharmaceutical company reported that while Imfinzi alone showed promising results, a combination approach using both Imfinzi and Imjudo with the pre-surgical treatment did not reach statistical significance for overall survival outcomes.
Key findings from the study include:
• When Imfinzi was administered both before and following surgical procedures, combined with pre-operative enfortumab vedotin (EV), patients experienced statistically meaningful improvements in both event-free survival and overall survival rates.
• Enfortumab vedotin serves as a pre-surgical treatment designed to reduce tumor size before the operation takes place.
• The treatment combinations showed safety profiles that matched expectations based on previous studies of the individual medications, with no unexpected safety concerns emerging during the trial.
• The company noted that approximately 25% of bladder cancer patients develop muscle-invasive disease, a condition where cancer cells penetrate the bladder’s muscle wall but have not spread to distant parts of the body.
