Unfortunately the recurrence rate after 1 year here is still quite high. Good progress, but not a cure yet.

There are EU trials as well. Perhaps contact your physician, insurance or Johnson & Johnson directly.

https://euclinicaltrials.eu/ctis-public/view/2023-507685-10-...

To be honest, chances are slim to none. But worth a try.

You may want to look at this study. Its preapproval expanded access. There is an email and phone numbers for the company which is running the study. Usually the further along the drug trial is they more the loosen the criteria. Wouldn't hurt the ask if its suitable for your father.

https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06877676?intr=TAR-200&ra...

So sorry to hear this, I wish him the best.

Pat Shoon Shiong had a cancer drug approved for targetting bladder cancer, don’t know whether Ukrainians can have access though.

1.look for clinicaltrial on https://clinicaltrials.gov/ .

2.See if your father qualifies for any

3. Enroll

4. Get B2 visa. All medical treatment is usually covered once you are accepted into the program.

good luck!

FWIW I can recommend Bundeswehrkrankenhaus Berlin, very good urology clinic there. Not sure if there's any chance for you since it's another country, but they're rather accepting and I'd say once there's patient with a life-threatening condition in their emergency they'd rather put them through the CT and into their surgical room rather than waste time. I feel a little shocked that your father is under palliative.

Always kind of bittersweet to read these breakthroughs in cancer treatment.

Very sorry for your loss. An uncle had bladder cancer about 15 years ago, and while he survived, it began a very steep decline that led to his passing in 2022.

So sorry to hear. My father passed from bladder cancer that metastasized 20 years ago.

That is tough, I’m sorry for your loss.

Sorry for your loss.

This is relatively common with experimental therapies in trials, and thus shouldn't be interpreted as the final say on its usage.

Part of the reason why is that it's difficult to convince patients or providers to reach for the experimental treatment in trial before the current standard of care. Many first-line treatments began as second/third-line or salvage treatments before experiencing line promotion or (if surgery is involved) neoadjuvant promotion. Keytruda is a good example of this progression in action.

Only those patients were admitted to the trial, so the effectiveness of the treatment on later-stage muscle-invasive disease is unknown. That it's scoped to patients who are BCG-unresponsive ("previously resisted treatment") makes the breakthrough more significant, not less.

As I noted elsewhere in the thread:

(1) For this trial, patients with MIBC (as opposed to NMIBC) weren't in the cohort, so we don't know what the results will be with MIBC.

(2) "After failing current standard treatments" makes the result more impressive, not less.

This "drug" is a weakened form of the bacterium, which apparently stimulates immune response. So I guess it works for both TB and bladder cancer just by getting your immune system to notice something is amiss?

I can explain. BCG infects the actual epithelial cancer cells inside the bladder, triggering Th-1 response (production and release of cytokines by activated CD4 T cells).

The cytokines induce an inflammatory response, which I turn activates other immune system cells such as CD4 and CD8, NK cells and macrophages.

The immune cells then attack the bladder cancer cells, hopefully destroying them, thus "fighting cancer".

Source: Li J et al, NPJ Vaccines. 2021;6:14.

Turning it off and then on again works in a lot of surprising places

One of the things I learned going through my own treatment (prostate) was that everyone's cancer is different. Which makes sense if you think about the variability in malignant cell growth.

So something that cures half the patients and only requires an office or outpatient visit every few weeks (no surgery, no radiation) is astounding. This result will likely lead to further research using this approach.

More than half would be nice, but: these tests were run on "individuals with high-risk non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer whose cancer had previously resisted treatment." One could expect that it would be even more effective on patients whose cancers were not resistant to treatment.

That's one way of looking at the glass half empty.

If half of people get rid of cancer for 1 year that is still outstanding - ESPECIALLY if the majority of those remain cancer free for quite some time after.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Dumb question: why not rely on the article contents to provide context?

This is 81% CR in patients who had already had recurrence and progression after front-line treatment, so neither of your concerns about the headline are relevant to the actual story.