Genitourinary Cancers

The 108th AUA Annual Meeting held May 4-8 in San Diego, California, contained over 2,000 presentations focused on urologic medicine. This entry contains summaries of four abstracts focused on urothelial, testicular, and prostate cancer.

Steve Dobbs, the CEO of Urologic Specialists of Oklahoma, Inc, discusses the viability, legality, and successful implementation of an office-based medication-dispensing solution.

A single clinical trial was deemed insufficient to support approval of tivozanib for the treatment of patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma, according to a 13-1 vote by the FDA's Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee.

Robert Dreicer, MD, MS, from the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, discusses a 2-weeks-on and 1-week-off (2/1) schedule of sunitinib for patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma.

AGS-003, a personalized dendritic cell immunotherapy, demonstrated prolonged survival benefits in patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma, with one-third of those who took the drug during a phase II trial still alive after nearly four years.

An international group of investigators provided first-time evidence of the impact of smoking on outcomes in bladder cancer in results from two studies.

An interview with Bryan Mehlhaff, MD, and retired physician Robert Litin, MD, about how Oregon Urology Institute is adapting its well-established practice to an ever-shifting healthcare landscape.

Karen E. Hoffman, MD, MHSc, MPH, from the MD Anderson Cancer Center, describes the diagnosing urologist's influence on the initial treatment selected for elderly men with favorable prostate cancer.

Robert J. Motzer, MD, from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, discusses the COMPARZ trial that compared pazopanib to sunitinib as a first-line therapy for patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma.

Leonard G. Gomella, MD, discusses the benefits of the multidisciplinary center at Jefferson Kimmel Cancer Center.

Ashish M. Kamat, MD, from MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses enhancing clinical trial recruitment through a novel definition of BCG therapy failure in patients with nonmuscle invasive bladder cancer.

Collaborative and standardized efforts to develop and evaluate novel drugs are necessary to ultimately provide effective long-term treatment for nonmuscle-invasive bladder cancer.

Although the 2009 AUA guidelines cite "compelling data" for consideration of nephron-sparing surgery in all patients, partial nephrectomy remains underutilized for small renal masses.

Deepak A. Kapoor, MD, president of the Large Urology Group Practice Association, discusses the greater exposure to high-quality healthcare that is provided by the integration of ancillary services into community urology practices.

Matthew D. Galsky, MD, from the Mount Sinai Medical Center Tisch Cancer Institute, discusses the development of a post-treatment prognostic model for patients with metastatic urothelial cancer.

Robert H. Weiss, MD, from the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses peroxisome PPAR-alpha as a possible new treatment target for patients with renal cell carcinoma.

William C. Huang, MD, from the New York University Langone Medical Center, discusses findings from a SEER database analysis that compared surveillance to surgical resection in elderly patients with small renal masses.

Axitinib did not demonstrate superiority over sorafenib as first-line therapy for patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma, on the endpoint of progression-free survival.

Combination targeted therapy did not significantly extend progression-free survival compared with single-agent bevacizumab in patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma.

Robert J. Motzer, MD, from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, discusses the overall survival results from the phase III TIVO-1 study that compared tivozanib to sorafenib in patients with renal cell carcinoma.

Deepak A. Kapoor, MD, president of the Large Urology Group Practice Association, discusses the implications of a large study looking at the detection of prostate cancer using prostate biopsies.

When the founding partners of Chesapeake Urology Associates (CUA) in Maryland decided to merge their practices, Sanford J. Siegel, MD, CUA's president and CEO, drew inspiration from another consolidation process.

Judd W. Moul, MD, from the Duke Cancer Institute, comments on practice trends in urologic cancer care and the advantages and disadvantages of his institution's multidisciplinary prostate cancer clinic.

Srikala Sridhar, MD, MSc, from the University of Toronto, Canada, discusses the results of a single arm phase II trial examining nab-paclitaxel as a secondary treatment for urothelial cancer.

Nab-paclitaxel might offer some hope for patients with advanced urothelial cancer, an area that has lagged behind the rapid growth in available therapies for other genitourinary cancers.