The Daily Populous Sunday August 17th, 2025 morning edition
Authored by news.keckmedicine.org and submitted by AdTrue3704

TAR-200 is a miniature, pretzel-shaped drug-device duo containing a chemotherapy drug, gemcitabine, which is inserted into the bladder through a catheter and releases the drug for three weeks per treatment cycle.

How the drug delivery system works

TAR-200 is a miniature, pretzel-shaped drug-device duo containing a chemotherapy drug, gemcitabine, which is inserted into the bladder through a catheter. Once inside the bladder, the TAR-200 slowly and consistently releases the gemcitabine into the organ for three weeks per treatment cycle.

Traditionally, gemcitabine has been delivered to the bladder as a liquid solution that only stays in the bladder for a few hours, which had limited effect destroying the cancer, said Daneshmand, who is also a member of the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center .

“The theory behind this study was that the longer the medicine sits inside the bladder, the more deeply it would penetrate the bladder and the more cancer it would destroy,” he said. “And it appears that having the chemotherapy released slowly over weeks rather than in just a few hours is a much more effective approach.”

The patient population in the clinical trial

The clinical trial, known as the SunRISe-1, was conducted at 144 locations globally, including at Keck Hospital of USC . It included 85 patients with high-risk non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer.

Non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer is the most common form of bladder cancer. The disease is considered high risk when, depending on the type and location of the tumors, the cancer carries a higher chance of recurrence and/or spreading to the bladder muscles or other parts of the body.

The standard treatment for this type of bladder cancer is an immunotherapy drug, Bacillus Calmette-Guérin, which may be ineffective in a percentage of patients. All the patients in the clinical trial had been previously treated with this drug, but their cancer had returned.

“The standard treatment plan for these patients was surgery to remove the bladder and surrounding tissue and organs, which has many health risks and may negatively impact patients’ quality of life,” said Daneshmand.

To offer patients a better option, urologic oncologists treated patients with TAR-200 every three weeks for six months, and then four times a year for the next two years. In 70 out of 85 patients, the cancer disappeared and for almost half the patients, was still gone a year later. The treatment was well-tolerated, with minimal side effects.

The study also showed that administering TAR-200 along with another immunotherapy drug (cetrelimab) did not prove as effective as TAR-200 on its own and had more side effects.

While participants in the clinical trial will be followed for another year, the study is closed to new participants.

The future of slow-release cancer drugs

This clinical trial is one of several ongoing ones investigating the effect of TAR-200 and the slow release of cancer-fighting drugs into the bladder to fight cancer.

“We are at an exciting moment in history,” said Daneshmand, who has been researching this novel treatment since 2016. “Our mission is to deliver cancer-fighting medications into the bladder that will offer lasting remission from cancer, and it looks like we are well on our way toward that goal.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted TAR-200 a New Drug Application Priority Review, which means the FDA plans to take quicker action on the application than other applications.

The health care corporation Johnson & Johnson manufactures TAR-200.

Mmmmarkus on August 17th, 2025 at 03:17 UTC »

My dad noticed visible, dark blood in his urine, gross hematuria is the medical term, he immediately went to his doctor with a sample as he was very alarmed, but unfortunately we later learned he was incorrectly tested with just a urinalysis, cytology and other basic tests.

He was then falsely reassured everything was fine and it was a UTI, prescribed antibiotics and never referred to a urologist to investigate the causation of the visible blood in his urine. We also later learned his doctor didn’t follow urgent referral protocol, and NICE guidelines, which recommend urgent cystoscopy for visible hematuria by a urologist specialist.

Eighteen months later, after severe back pain, and more GP and hospital visits, and eventually being admitted to hospital because he could no longer stand, he was finally diagnosed with stage 4 bladder cancer which had metastasized to his neighboring organs and bones. He sadly never left the hospital and passed away a short and devastating month later, just two months before the birth of his grandson.

Please, if you or anyone you know ever sees blood in urine, even once, push for a cystoscopy, and don’t take no for an answer. It could be the only sign you ever get from early stage bladder cancer and could save a life.

My dad was an incredible man and a wonderful father. I miss him terribly every single day, and I can’t help but think how different things might have been if he’d received the proper screening his symptoms so clearly warranted.

Atalung on August 17th, 2025 at 01:33 UTC »

This is great but why is the article so insistent on my knowing it's pretzel-shaped?

mister_hoot on August 16th, 2025 at 23:05 UTC »

I need to buy Wetzel's stock before this hits the mainstream, I'll be a gajillionaire.