Durvalumab (MEDI4736) and TREmelimumab in NEOadjuvant Bladder Cancer Patients (DUTRENEO)

In the treatment of localized/locally advanced urothelial cancer, there are several questions that have not yet been resolved, such as the limited benefit of cisplatin-based chemotherapy in the adjuvant or neoadjuvant context, the difficulty in establishing which groups actually benefit from either perioperative treatment and what are the molecular markers that could help us predict the response to this treatment to allow a better selection of patients. On the other hand, not all patients are candidates for cisplatin-based chemotherapy and carboplatin is not comparable in activity, so there is an urgent need to find other drugs that may offer a therapeutic opportunity to these patients. In the context of metastatic disease, immunotherapy has been able to modify the natural history of this disease, administered as monotherapy, but the combination with double immune checkpoint inhibitors is also being evaluated with promising results. Even this therapeutic strategy is being advanced to the context of adjuvant and neoadjuvant treatment of urothelial tumors. In this sense, on the one hand, the present study, as a research in the neoadjuvant setting, constitutes the opportunity to define molecular phenotypes in bladder cancer since the design of this study will allow both, to evaluate the efficacy of the drug when the tumor is operable and to carry out an extensive analysis of biomarkers in the tumor tissue of these patients with an in-vivo evaluation of immune-based therapy activity. On the other hand, it allows to evaluate a strategy of double-immune checkpoint inhibitors that has already demonstrated activity in metastatic disease and, taking into account, the modest benefit of standard chemotherapy in the perioperative context: platinum-based neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) Modest increase in overall survival, but only a subset of eligible patients are eligible to receive it. In addition, radical cystectomy alone, in MIBC patients, presents a 5-year relapse rate of 10-50%.