Opinion
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Joshua J. Meeks, MD, PhD, discusses NIAGARA data for patient undergoing cystectomy
“It's going to be an important time for US urologists to identify that this is becoming the standard of care," says Joshua J. Meeks, MD, PhD.
A report of disease-free survival analyses from the NIAGARA (6372115478112) trial of perioperative durvalumab (Imfinzi) plus neoadjuvant chemotherapy in muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) found that the treatment regimen was associated with a reduced risk of disease recurrence or death compared with neoadjuvant chemotherapy alone in patients in patients undergoing radical cystectomy.1
The data were presented at the 2025 American Urological Association Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, by Joshua J. Meeks, MD, PhD, the Edward M. Schaeffer, MD, PhD Professor of Urology and associate professor of urology, biochemistry, and molecular genetics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois. In a recent interview with Urology Times®, Meeks discussed the impact of these results.
“It's going to be an important time for US urologists to identify that this is becoming the standard of care. I think it's important for us as providers who take care of patients with bladder cancer to have that systemic therapy discussion, because usually we've been telling patients, you're going to go get chemotherapy. It could be 2-drug regimen. It could be a 5-drug regimen. This is what we think. And now it's a discussion of potentially a chemotherapy regimen with immunotherapy. It’s important for people to know when we offer people neoadjuvant therapy with immunotherapy, this is the expected outcome. This is the time to surgery that we anticipate afterwards. Adjuvant therapy is likely potentially going to be a part of it, and this is how long it usually takes. Those are all the things we're going to we're going to talk about—if you take NIAGARA, what's important to urologists specifically.”
REFERENCE
1. Meeks JJ, van der Heijden MS, Powles T, et al. The first report of disease-free survival analyses from the NIAGARA trial of perioperative durvalumab plus neoadjuvant chemotherapy in muscle-invasive bladder cancer. J Urol. 2025;213(5S):e1340. doi:10.1097/01.JU.0001110188.58981.bc.09
