A Head-to-Head Comparison of the First-Line Treatments for Locally Advanced or Metastatic Urothelial Cancer: Is There Still a Role for Chemotherapy?

Background: Patients with locally advanced/metastatic urothelial cancer have been conventionally treated with platinum-based chemotherapy. Recently, numerous new treatments have been proposed to improve overall survival (OS) and reduce adverse effects, but no direct head-to-head comparisons among these agents are available.

Methods: The treatments evaluated in our analyses included (a) monotherapy with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI); (b) combinations of an ICI with chemotherapy; and (c) combinations of an ICI with other drugs. Using OS as the endpoint, a series of indirect comparisons were performed to rank the most effective regimens against both chemotherapy and each other. Our analysis was based on the application of an artificial intelligence software program (IPDfromKM method) that reconstructs individual patient data from the information reported in the graphs of Kaplan-Meier curves.

Results: A total of five studies published in six articles were included. In our main analysis, nivolumab plus chemotherapy showed better OS compared to chemotherapy (HR = 0.70, 95% CI: 0.59-0.82), while durvalumab plus tremelimumab showed no OS benefit (HR = 0.95, 95% CI 0.82-1.11). More interestingly, enfortumab vedotin plus pembrolizumab significantly prolonged OS compared to both chemotherapy alone (HR = 0.53, 95% CI 0.45-0.63) and nivolumab plus chemotherapy (HR = 0.76, 95% CI 0.60-0.97).

Discussion And Conclusion: Among new treatments for locally advanced and metastatic urothelial cancer, enfortumab vedotin plus pembrolizumab showed the best efficacy in terms of OS. Our results support the use of this combination as a first-line treatment in this setting.