Navigating Bladder Cancer Treatment Choices With More Options

At the 2026 NCCN Annual Meeting, Dr. Charles Peyton spoke with CURE about how a growing number of treatment options is influencing decision-making in bladder cancer care, particularly as innovation continues to accelerate across disease stages.

As therapeutic advances continue to expand, particularly in earlier-stage disease, both clinicians and patients are navigating a more nuanced landscape that requires careful consideration of benefits, risks and access. This evolving environment has made shared decision-making increasingly important, as patients weigh multiple approaches that may differ in administration, side effect profiles and long-term outcomes.

In this conversation, Peyton underscores the importance of informed discussions and encourages patients to take an active role in understanding their treatment choices and collaborating closely with their care team.

Peyton is an associate professor in the Department of Urology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine.

Transcript

How are these treatment decisions being personalized, and how can patients better work with their care team to make sure it is the right decision for them?

Patients need to ask about new therapies for non-muscle invasive bladder cancer if that is what they have, and they can certainly look for it online, too. These new medicines are available all over the internet. Doing some research before you see your provider for non-muscle invasive bladder cancer is really helpful.

The one piece of advice I would have for patients with specific non-muscle invasive bladder cancer: most of those medicines, the urologist is going to be more familiar with them than the medical oncologist in a lot of situations. That's not totally true, but in most situations, the urologist is the one delivering a lot of these treatments because they are intravesical treatments, meaning they are medicines in the bladder. In the metastatic setting or the muscle-invasive setting, that's a different story.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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