A new type of pharmaceutical to treat bladder cancer may become the method of choice, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Bladder cancer treatment is about to change dramatically based on a trial showing that adding an antibody to a toxic substance is much more effective than current treatments. Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer director William Nelson describes this class of pharmaceuticals.

Nelson: They're called antibody dependent drug conjugates. The antibody itself has the ability to bind something very specifically, in this case it binds something on the bladder cancer cells, so they have attached a toxin to it. There are a little bit more than a dozen or so these antibody dependent drug conjugates have been FDA approved. There's more than 90 in early clinical development across the country. These are going to slowly but surely change the face of cancer care. This was tested along with pembrolizumab.  It doubled the overall survival definitely a successful trial.   :31

Nelson says getting the toxin to stick to the antibody but then release once it gets to the target was successful in this trial and resulted in dramatically improved survival. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.