Dr Joaquim Bellmunt is presently Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and Director of Bladder Cancer Center at Genitourinary Oncology Program of Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He was the former Director of the Bladder Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Clinical expertise focuses on urological diseases, particularly prostate, bladder and kidney cancer. Extensive experience treating prostate and bladder cancer patients and have been a key investigator in several trials conducted in this patient population.
He have been involved in the development of immunotherapy in bladder cancer since its inception. He has participated on the two phase I trials with atezolizumab (Nature. 2014 and with pembrolizumab (Lancet Oncol. 2017) and the phase II atezolizumab (Lancet 2016) that lead to the FDA approval of both agents. Along the same line, He has contributed to the development of these agents in unfit bladder cancer patients (Lancet 2017). One of the most important contributions in bladder cancer has been to be the Chair and lead investigator of the phase III randomized study of vinflunine versus BSC and immunotherapy (pembrolizumab) versus chemotherapy that led to the approval for these agents in second line of therapy. This last trail is a landmark trial showing survival superiority for immunotherapy versus chemotherapy.
The results of this study were published in the NEJM (Bellmunt J, N Engl J Med. 2017). He has been also the PI of the study IMvigor 010 (adjuvant atezolizumab in bladder cancer) that despite being negative, lead to the identification of ctDNA utility for MRD monitoring. He is co-author of the Javelin 100 study that has led to the recent approval of maintenance avelumab. He is ASCO, ESMO, SEOM and SOGUG member.