Urothelial bladder cancer is one of the most lethal cancers worldwide with barely 5% five-year survival in patients with metastatic disease. Intravesical immunotherapy with Bacillus Calmette-Guérin and platinum-based chemotherapy are currently the standard of care for non-muscle invasive and advanced or metastatic urothelial cancer (mUC), respectively. Recently, a subset of patients with locally advanced or mUC has shown to be responsive to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), e.g., the anti-cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated protein 4 and programmed cell death -1/programmed death-ligand1 (PD-1/PD-L1) antibodies. Due to the relevant clinical benefit of immunotherapy for mUC, in 2016, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved five immunotherapeutic agents as second-line or first-line treatments for patients with advanced bladder cancer who did not profit from or were ineligible for standard therapy. In this review, we discuss the role of immunotherapy in bladder cancer and recent clinical applications of PD-1/PD-L1 blockade in mUC. Furthermore, we evaluate a variable response rate to ICIs treatment and outline potential biomarkers predictive of immunotherapy response.
Keywords: PD-1; PD-L1; biomarkers; bladder cancer.