MSK is a major research institution. During your treatment for bladder cancer, your care team may ask if you want to join a clinical trial.

What is a clinical trial?

Clinical trials are research studies that test new treatments, procedures, or devices to see how well they work. They are an important part of helping to prevent, treat, and cure cancer. Almost every cancer treatment given to patients was first tested during a clinical trial.

MSK tests new treatments for bladder cancer. Treatment trials test new drugs, drug combinations, devices, and ways of doing procedures, surgery, or radiation therapy.

Sometimes a clinical trial gives you access to new therapies that are not yet available at most hospitals. Talk with your doctor about whether joining a clinical trial is right for you.

Clinical trials are designed to answer questions about:

• Safety
• Benefits
• Side effects
• Whether some people are helped more than others

MSK will start a clinical trial only if our researchers think we can improve methods for cancer:

• Prevention
• Treatment
• Diagnosis
• Screening

For more information, please read Clinical Trials at MSK: What You Need to Know.

MSK is developing or improving treatments for people with bladder cancer.

• We led the way in developing immunotherapy drugs for advanced bladder cancer.
• Our patients were among the first to get atezolizumab (Tencentriq®) as part of a clinical trial. Based on this research, it became the first new drug approved for bladder cancer in more than 20 years.
• Our researchers also directed studies that led to the approval of pembrolizumab (Keytruda®) for bladder cancer.

Current bladder cancer research at MSK

Our current research focuses on genetics and people with bladder cancer. We’re looking at who is more likely to respond well to these immunotherapy drugs, based on the genetic makeup of their tumors.

We’re always looking for ways to make these immunotherapy drugs work better in more people. That includes combining a checkpoint inhibitor with chemotherapy, and testing combinations of checkpoint inhibitors.

MSK researchers also are exploring ways to improve responses to bladder cancer treatments other than immunotherapy.

Our experts can help determine which clinical trial is right for you, including some of our newly opened clinical trials:

• 21-166 A Phase II Study of Oral Erdafitinib in People with Recurrent Non-Invasive Bladder Cancer
• 21-314 A Phase I Study of 2141-V11 Immunotherapy in People with Non-Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer that Did Not Respond to Standard Treatment
• 19-374 A Phase I/II Study Assessing the Addition of Gemcitabine to BCG Treatment in People with High-Grade Non-Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer that Returned after Prior BCG
• 17-602 A Phase II Study of Pembrolizumab Immunotherapy as Initial Therapy for High-Risk Non-Muscle-Invasive Bladder Cancer
• 18-460 A Phase II Study of Chemotherapy without Surgery in Patients with Muscle-Invasive Bladder Cancer and Certain Gene Mutations

You can see a current listing of MSK’s clinical trials for bladder cancer below.