By improving response rates before surgery, adding intravesical BCG can reduce the number of patients requiring follow-up adjuvant systemic therapy. This de-escalation strategy limits patients' overall exposure to toxic treatments and their side effects, a key benefit beyond improving primary outcomes.
For muscle-invasive bladder cancer patients achieving a complete response to neoadjuvant therapy, a barrier to forgoing bladder removal is local relapse risk. Adding intravesical BCG could prevent these recurrences, making bladder preservation a more viable long-term strategy for these patients.
The Sac o six nineteen trial showed compelling results adding BCG to a chemo-immunotherapy backbone. However, the standard of care has already shifted to a newer combination (enfortumab vedotin and pembrolizumab), making it difficult to translate the study's findings into current practice and complicating the design of future trials.