Challenges and opportunities in the management of non-urothelial bladder cancers

Abstract

Urothelial carcinoma accounts for approximately 90% of all bladder cancer diagnoses. Localized, muscle-invasive disease is often managed with a multidisciplinary approach including either neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) followed by radical cystectomy or concurrent chemoradiation, whereas multiple immunotherapies and novel antibody drug conjugates have recently joined platinum-based chemotherapy as standard of care therapy for metastatic disease. However, the clinical trials leading to these standards often require majority if not complete urothelial histology for eligibility. As many as one quarter of patients diagnosed with bladder cancer will have either divergent differentiation of their urothelial carcinoma or an alternate epithelial tumor such as squamous cell carcinoma, adenocarcinoma, or small cell carcinoma; even more rare are non-epithelial tumors such as sarcoma. The rarity of these diseases and their general exclusion from treatment within prospective clinical trials has created a challenging situation where treatment plans are often derived from case series or extrapolated from other disease types and outcomes are poor compared to pure urothelial carcinoma. In this review, we summarize the existing data on the diagnosis and treatment of epithelial, non-urothelial bladder cancers including adenocarcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and small cell carcinoma in their localized and advances stages. We will also review the current clinical trial landscape investigating novel approaches to these diseases.