Over 81,000 new individuals are diagnosed each year with urothelial carcinoma (UC) of the bladder and 17,000 will die from their disease. Most have non-muscle invasive disease (NMIBC) at diagnosis. Despite standard treatment with the live, attenuated mycobacterial strain Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) instilled into the bladder, two-thirds of NMIBC patients will develop relapsed tumors after BCG treatment. While curative, cystectomy is associated with life-altering quality of life impact and is not feasible, or is refused, in many. Nonsurgical curative options for BCG-relapsing NMIBC patients are lacking. In metastatic UC, durable responses with low toxicity rates have been observed with checkpoint inhibitor (CPI) therapies aimed at the programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) / programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) pathway leading to the FDA approval of five agents. Examining novel combination approaches including CPIs in BCG-relapsing NMIBC represents a natural next step. In this proposal, we plan to define the safety and clinical activity, assess the point-of-care diagnostic potential of several genomic biomarker platforms, and perform initial mechanistic investigations of novel combinations of CPI therapy with both BCG and radiation in the multi-arm, multi-stage ADAPT-BLADDER phase 1b/2 clinical trial, with the long-term goal of informing the design of future practice-changing phase 3 trials. Objectives: 1) To demonstrate safety and clinical efficacy of immunotherapy combination regimens in patients with BCG-relapsing NMIBC; 2) To identify conserved candidate genomic signatures associated with clinical benefit and/or treatment resistance to novel immunotherapy regimens in NMIBC patients with recurrent tumors after prior BCG therapy; 3) To demonstrate the existence of tumor antigen-specific T-cell responses and correlate such responses with clinical outcomes to novel immunotherapy regimens in NMIBC patients with recurrent tumors after prior BCG therapy. Methods: We will assess each objective prospectively through the multi-center phase 1 b / 2 ADAPT- BLADDER trial in over 170 patients with BCG-relapsing NMIBC. Specifically, we will document the safety of each regimen in phase 1 and clinical efficacy in phase 2. We will correlate baseline and post- treatment genomic biomarker signatures with clinical benefit. Lastly, we will interrogate the ability of personalized neoantigen peptide libraries to expand antigen-specific T-cell clones. We hypothesize that immunotherapy combination regimens will be safe and effective. Moreover, we anticipate the identification of point-of-care genomic biomarker signatures that can distinguish patients most likely to benefit; we expect to identify novel gene expression signatures predictive of therapy response and resistance; and we suspect the planned functional tumor immunology investigations will yield illuminating discoveries.

Public Health Relevance

In this proposal, we plan to conduct a novel adaptive phase 1b/2 clinical trial (ADAPT-BLADDER) to study the clinical safety and efficacy, genomic biomarker signatures predictive of patient benefit, and mechanisms underlying tumor antigen-specific adaptive immune responses of innovative combination immunotherapy regimens to treat BCG-relapsing non-muscle invasive bladder cancer patients. This research will improve the overall public health of bladder cancer patients by providing data crucial to optimizing patient selection in future phase 3 studies with the ultimate goal of establishing new durable bladder-sparing options for BCG-relapsing patients. Furthermore, this proposal has important relevance to all cancers since the need to optimize combination immunotherapy approaches is not restricted to bladder cancer patients.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Cancer Institute (NCI)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01CA235681-02
Application #
9868289
Study Section
Clinical Oncology Study Section (CONC)
Program Officer
Song, Min-Kyung H
Project Start
2019-02-15
Project End
2024-01-31
Budget Start
2020-02-01
Budget End
2021-01-31
Support Year
2
Fiscal Year
2020
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
Johns Hopkins University
Department
Internal Medicine/Medicine
Type
Schools of Medicine
DUNS #
001910777
City
Baltimore
State
MD
Country
United States
Zip Code
21205