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Personalized Pathways: Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer Care 2026 | Part 1: Understanding the Dual Role of ctDNA

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Description

This program is supported by an independent educational grant from Genentech. This accredited education activity is available to U.S. healthcare professionals only.

This is Part 1 of a three-part series:

In this 15-minute on-demand module, join leading cancer expert Dr. Matthew Galsky for this accredited, case-based online CME activity focused on the evolving role of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC). Through practical clinical scenarios, faculty will examine how ctDNA can be applied as both a prognostic and predictive biomarker to inform individualized adjuvant treatment decisions and multidisciplinary care coordination.

Prefer to read instead? Read our Key Clinical Summary here.

Accreditation: 0.25 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™

Session Overview

  • Evolution of ctDNA as MRD Tool: Trace the history of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) from its discovery in 1948 to its current role in assessing Minimal Residual Disease (MRD).
  • Adjuvant Immunotherapy Outcomes: Review primary data from the CheckMate 274, AMBASSADOR, and IMvigor010 trials investigating PD-1/PD-L1 blockade.
  • ctDNA as a Prognostic Indicator: Analyze retrospective data showing that ctDNA presence accurately identifies patients at higher risk of recurrence after surgery.
  • Treatment-Guiding vs. Prognostic Use: Differentiate between the evidentiary strength of retrospective prognostic analyses and prospective, treatment-guiding clinical trial designs.
  • Potential Clinical Endpoints: Evaluate whether ctDNA clearance can serve as a valid intermediate clinical endpoint for long-term survival in muscle-invasive bladder cancer.

Who Should Attend?

This program is designed for U.S.-based healthcare professionals involved in the management of patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer, including:

  • Community medical oncologists
  • Urologists
  • Oncology nurse practitioners
  • Physician assistants
  • Other healthcare professionals interested in muscle-invasive bladder cancer

Faculty

Matthew Galsky, MD

Dr. Galsky is a medical oncologist specializing in genitourinary malignancies, with a primary focus on bladder cancer. His clinical and research interests include biomarker-driven treatment strategies, perioperative and adjuvant therapy decision-making, and the integration of circulating tumor DNA into clinical practice. He has extensive experience translating emerging clinical trial data into practical, multidisciplinary approaches to patient-centered bladder cancer care.

Continuing Education Information

This continuing education activity will be provided by Current Concepts Institute (CCI) and MedAll. Physicians, Nurse Practitioners, and Physician Assistants will be eligible for AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™. A statement of participation is available for other healthcare professionals.

Unapproved and/or off-label use disclosure

Current Concepts Institute/MedAll requires CE faculty to disclose to the participants:

1. When products or procedures being discussed are off-label, unlabelled, experimental, and/or investigational (not US Food and Drug Administration [FDA] approved); and

2. Any limitations on the information presented, such as data that are preliminary or that represent ongoing research, interim analyses, and/or unsupported opinion.

Disclosures

Below is a listing of all individuals who are involved in the planning and implementation of this accredited continuing education activity. All relevant financial relationships listed for these individuals have been mitigated.

Matthew Galsky, MD has disclosed financial interests or relationships within the past 24 months with the following ineligible companies: Consultant for Merck, Research Support from Merck, Travel from Pfizer. These disclosures are made in accordance with ACCME standards to ensure transparency and objectivity in continuing education. Dr. Galsky may reference any unlabeled or unapproved uses of products during the presentation. He will disclose to the audience when this discussion takes place.

CCI staff (Christine Heim), MedAll staff (Gabriele Marija Baltrusyte, Phil McElnay, Judith Lewis, and Gemma Thomas) have no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies to disclose.

Activity Accreditation for Health Professions

Physicians

0.25 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™ are available for this activity.

This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of Current Concepts Institute and MedAll Education. Current Concepts Institute is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

Current Concepts Institute designates this online activity a maximum of 0.25 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Other Professionals

All other health care professionals completing this continuing education activity will be issued a statement of participation indicating the number of hours of continuing education credit. This may be used for professional education CE credit. Please consult your accrediting organization or licensing board for their acceptance of this CE activity.

Participation Costs

There is no cost to participate in this program.

This continuing education activity will expire on March 1st 2027.

Estimated time to complete this activity: 15 min

Learning objectives

Upon completion of this activity, participants should be better able to:

  • Critically appraise clinical trial designs and methodologies to differentiate between prospective, treatment-guiding use of ctDNA and retrospective, prognostic analyses, accurately interpreting the evidentiary strength, limitations, and clinical applicability of each within contemporary adjuvant decision-making frameworks.

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Computer generated transcript

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The following transcript was generated automatically from the content and has not been checked or corrected manually.

So let's jump right in. Today, I'm gonna talk about the role of CTDNA in yourothelial cancer. Here are my disclosures. And our learning objectives today are to critically appraise clinical trial designs involving the use of circulating tumor DNA to inform treatment decisions in patients with urothelial cancer. So let's start with what we know, what we don't know, and what we might want to learn in ongoing studies. What we know right now is that CTDNA really does tell us who needs adjuvant treatment after radical surgery for muscle invasive urothelial cancer. What we don't know for certain, although there are certainly some compelling evidence, is whether or not CTDNA tells us who doesn't need adjuvant treatment. Um, I would say that right now, what we really don't know is whether or not CTDNA can inform us who needs neoadjuvant therapy or not. There is some early data, but we need more data to define that particular treatment decision. So I'm gonna go through the data that informs each of those points, and then we'll circle back to those at the end. So CTDNA as a measure of minimal residual disease, certainly not a new field, uh, CTDNA, in fact, circulating, uh, um, uh, free DNA was first recognized in 1948, uh, and the technology has evolved over time to be able to determine that CTDNA can represent a measure in individual patients of molecular. residual disease and might serve as a key therapeutic decision point for individuals who've undergone radical surgery for a solid tumor in determining whether or not there's residual disease in informing the use of adjuvant therapy. The technology that I'm going to be discussing mostly today is tumor-informed cTDNA testing and specifically tumor-informed cTDNA testing using the Signaera assay, and the reason that I'm focusing on this assay is that this is where the bulk of evidence has been generated to date in urothelial cancer. So this assay involves whole exome sequencing of a patient's primary tumor. Identifying up to 16 alterations using that um DNA sequencing data, and then, uh, designing a bespoke PCR-based assay to identify those 16 alterations in plasma samples to try and detect minimal amounts of CTDNA. Uh, that's informed by a patient's primary tumor specimen. And you can see in the schema that this can be done at baseline, this can be done prior to surgery, it can be done immediately after surgery, it can be done serially. And those different endpoints probably inform different treatment decisions and have different prognostic implications as well. So let's move to this polling question. Your patient with muscle invasive bladder cancer has undergone radical cystectomy. They ask whether their CTDNA results should determine whether they should receive adjuvant immunotherapy. You recall the results of the adjuvant PD1 PDL1 trials that included retrospective CTDNA analysis, and based on these data, how would you advise the patient? Would you use CTDNA as a validated tool to decide if they should receive adjuvant immunotherapy? Would you explain that CTD analysis and relevant trials were retrospective and prognostic but not treatment guiding? Would you recommend adjuvant immunotherapy only if the patient has a CTDNA positive? Would you advise advise against adjuvant therapy if the patient's assay is CTDNA negative, or would you use cTDNA to determine whether neoadjuvant therapy was necessary? So, uh, please log in your answers. Which of the following do you feel is, is appropriate based on the data? So, let's talk about the data that might inform that decision, uh, and then later we'll get to some prospective data that really, uh, in addition to establishing clinical validity for cTDNA testing, uh, which is really based on the data that I'm gonna show you now, uh, establishes clinical utility for cTDNA testing. So we have 3 studies that have asked a very similar question in patients with high risk muscle invasive urureythelial cancer after radical resection, and that question is, should patients receive adjuvant therapy with immune checkpoint blockade, with PD1 or PDA1 blockade, or should they just proceed with observation? These studies were very similar in design, used very similar eligibility criteria, though there were some nuances and some slight differences in the primary endpoints of the studies, but there's a little bit of difference in how the studies read out. The study called Invigor 10, which randomized patients to a year of atizalluzumab, the PDA-1 inhibitor versus observation, did not meet its primary endpoint of disease-free survival. Ambassador, which studied a year of pembrolizumab versus observation, did meet its primary endpoint showing an improvement in disease-free survival, and checkmate 274 met its primary endpoint showing an improvement to disease-free survival, uh, with adjuvant nivolumab. Of these studies, checkmate 274 has led to regulatory approval for adjuvant nivolumab, uh, in patients with high-risk muscle invasive urothelial cancer after radical surgery. So let's take a closer look at that data and really think about the value proposition of adjuvant immune checkpoint blockade in an unselected patient population. So here you see the disease-free survival curve for adjuvant nivolumab versus placebo in patients with high-risk muscle invasive urothelial cancer after radical resection, and you can see. Some, some really important points here by just inspecting these curves. One thing that you see is that patients on the placebo arm, a fair amount of them do really quite well and are likely already cured with the surgery that they received plus or minus neoadjuvant chemotherapy that they received. So arguably, these patients do not need further treatment. These patients, uh, the, the space between these two lines, of course, indicates the patients who both, uh, need treatment and benefit from treatment. These are patients who got adjuvant immune checkpoint blockade, where it really seems to make the difference in terms of recurrence versus not. And then of course these patients received adjuvant immune checkpoint blockade, but still did not derive benefit from treatment, still developed disease recurrence. So if we think about these three scenarios, it really paints the perfect picture for implementation of a precision medicine-based approach, because clearly there are patients here that were overtreating, there are patients here that were undertreating, and there are patients here for whom this is really the appropriate treatment. So how do we determine this better? Well, if we can identify who needs treatment in the adjuvant setting, that would be a start. And sometimes it's conflated biomarkers of patients who need treatment versus biomarkers of patients who benefit from treatment. In the adjuvant setting though, there's a double biomarker dilemma. Not only don't we know who benefits from specific drugs, but we actually don't even know who needs additional treatment because we don't know who has residual micrometastatic disease. And this is where CTDNA comes in. CTDNA is really the most promising biomarker that we've seen that might indicate who quote unquote needs additional treatment. So here's The retrospective data from the InvigorPen study that I was referring to, you'll remember that this was a study of adjuvant atizaluzumab for a year versus observation. The study didn't meet its primary endpoint, but the investigators from the study did a really important analysis. And what they did is ask retrospectively, would the results of this study have been different if we could determine CTDNA status immediately. After surgery and determine whether or not that separated individuals into those who needed treatment versus those who maybe didn't need treatment. And you can see here in the first Kaplan-Myer curve, disease-free survival, the second overall survival, the curves are stratified according to CTDNA status with patients with CTDNA undetectable assays on top, CTDNA positive assays on bottom, and then each curve indicates. Patients who were on the atizaluzumab in blue versus the observation arm in red, and you can see immediately that patients with undetectable CTDNA did not seem to derive benefit from the adjuvant immunotherapy and had a much lower risk for recurrence. Patients with detectable CTDNA at that single time point after surgery had a much higher risk of recurrence and are the ones who seemed to benefit from adjuvant immune checkpoint blockade. So really important uh retrospective data establishing clinical validity for cTDNA testing in this setting. So let's go to this polling question. Your patient asked whether their postoperative CTDNA result could be used to predict whether adjuvant immunotherapy will improve their long-term outcomes. Recalling the Invigor 10 CTD analysis CTDNA analysis findings that we just reviewed, how should you interpret the role of CTDNA-based minimal residual disease test.