REVIEW article
Front. Immunol.
Sec. Cancer Immunity and Immunotherapy
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1541213
This article is part of the Research TopicStreamlining Drug Approvals: Addressing Policy Challenges in Genitourinary OncologyView all 3 articles
Development and landscape of maintenance therapy after first-line treatment of advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma
Provisionally accepted
- 1Jilin University, Changchun, China
- 2Department of Cancer Center, The First Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, China
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Overall survival (OS) in patients with advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma (UC) is not optimistic. For a long time, the standard platinum-based chemotherapy has been one of the preferred treatment strategies. Despite the high initial objective response rate (ORR) to first-line chemotherapy in patients with metastatic UC, the rate of achieving complete response (CR) is low, and most patients will relapse within one year after first-line treatment. To further improve the OS of patients with metastatic UC, the success of the CheckMate901 and EV302 studies has brought new therapeutic options for the first-line treatment of these patients. Maintenance or consolidation therapy after first-line treatment is also important to improve the OS of patients with advanced UC. Maintenance therapy after first-line treatment of metastatic UC has undergone a long period of development until the success of the JAVELIN Bladder100 study. For the first time, this study established the application of avelumab as maintenance therapy after first-line platinum-containing chemotherapy. The aim of this paper is to review the development process of avelumab-based maintenance therapy after first-line treatment of advanced or metastatic UC and explore future options for maintenance therapy in patients with advanced or metastatic UC in the light of new firstline treatment options.
Keywords: Maintenance therapy1, Urothelial carcinoma (UC)2, Advanced3, metastatic4, Avelumab5
Received: 07 Dec 2024; Accepted: 11 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liu, Cong, Chen, Yin and Liu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Zi-Ling Liu, Jilin University, Changchun, China
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