Ashish Kamat: Hello, everybody, and welcome to Uro Today. I'm Ashish Kamat, urologic oncologist in Houston, Texas, and really looking forward to traveling to Washington, D.C. this year for AUA 2026. There's so much exciting stuff happening in bladder cancer, well, across urology, but for us, clearly we're bladder cancer addicts, Bogdana Schmidt and myself. So, looking forward to hearing what you are looking to see at AUA '26, Bogdana. Welcome.

Bogdana Schmidt: Thank you so much, Ashish, and thank you so much for giving me the chance to talk about this. I'm a urologic oncologist in Salt Lake City, Utah, and similarly very excited about getting to D.C., because we have a fantastic bladder cancer program this year. I feel like the bladder cancer programs for the last few years have just been standout, but this one particularly is really exciting because we're going to learn a little bit more details about some of the treatments that we've been discussing from previous AUA presentations, previous GU ASCO presentations, just a little bit more granularity, a little bit more detail about these buzzwords, escalation, de-escalation, new modalities, new mechanisms. Just learning a little bit more about how close are we to bringing these advances to our clinic patients.

Ashish Kamat: So again, you and I have gone through the program and we know what we're going to look forward to, but if somebody is listening in and going, "Oh, I'm going to come to AUA, but there's so much going on, what should I focus on in non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer," what abstracts, podium presentations, topics, would you tell them, "Hey, you gotta see this," and why?

Bogdana Schmidt: Well, I would say a couple must-not-miss sessions for me would be starting on Friday morning, there's a lot of bladder cancer even at the plenary stage, a lot of the late-breaking abstracts. If you want to know what's going on with BCG-naive intensification, so POTOMAC, PATAPSCO, all of this, introducing systemic therapy to BCG upfront, you're going to get some data on that. You're also going to see some of the newer agents like detalimogene and TARA updates presented. You're going to hear about the photodynamic therapy, TLD-1433. That's all Friday morning, and those are going to be really, really interesting because it's going to be our first time getting a little bit more details on this.

And that's in that BCG-unresponsive high-risk cohort, but we know that so much bladder cancer is intermediate-risk disease, and you're going to get some presentations on PIVOT-006, looking at cretostimogene in the intermediate-risk population, looking at durability analysis of UGN-102 and other chemoablative SURF302, looking at adjuvant therapy options. Really exciting stuff in that territory as well.

Ashish Kamat: So yeah, so for that session, I think like you said earlier, we're going to hear updates, longer-term data, focused subgroup presentations, some of them actually all close-to-completion trials. I think what's happened in bladder cancer, because there's so much going on, we've actually had a drip, drip, drip in some situations at conferences, and then you come to AUA and ...

Bogdana Schmidt: Oh, urologically appropriate.

Ashish Kamat: Right. Well, yeah, I didn't think of it. Maybe I should trademark that. But no, it's great. So yeah, really looking forward to that. And there's also going to be this workshop at the arena, the clinical trials in progress, a lot of great stuff happening. What about some actual sessions or other things that you would tell people, "Go check this out"?

Bogdana Schmidt: Well, I'm really excited to hear the Latimer lecture, Jeremy Teoh talking about the robotic en-bloc TURBT. I mean, it's always fun to get that innovative perspective. We all think we know how to do TURBT and don't mess with a good thing, but it's interesting to see the way innovative new technologies are being applied to problems that we think we have solutions to, so I'm excited to hear that.

Obviously on Sunday, I'm really looking forward to the IBCG session, so the rapid-fire debates and so many interesting topics. That's going to be really great. But even in the poster and abstract presentations, there's a lot of interesting, provocative data I want to hear. Some of that's Friday morning, conflicting with some of the plenary stuff, so I'll be trying to run a little back and forth between that and the late-breaking.

Ashish Kamat: So now let me ask you to put on a different hat. So now you tell people where they should go and what they should look out for, but let me ask you to put on a little bit of a hat and maybe look in your crystal ball. What do you think is going to surprise you the most?

Bogdana Schmidt: It's hard for me to say what I'm going to be surprised by, because that kinda goes against the whole concept of being surprised by it, but what I'm interested in seeing is are we going to move the needle after this AUA towards more directed therapy. In other words, are we still going to be looking at things more in a one-size-fits-all model, or are there going to be enough presentations that'll say within the near future, we'll be able to target individual patients' bladder cancer treatment based on their individual presentations, whether that's going to come from some of the presentations on inclusion of AI histopath, on some urinary tumor DNA or mutation analysis, on some response patterns or durability of response patterns that we're going to see. I would be surprised if we get significant movement in that at this AUA, but that's what I'd be excited most about if we did.

Ashish Kamat: Yeah. I was trying to set you up on purpose because, I mean, I know you know all this stuff and you're so well versed with things. So I was actually going to try to tell you that you could have said, "I'll be surprised if anything happens that I'm not expecting already."

Bogdana Schmidt: Well, I think that it's exciting to hear how some of these things are received as well. You start to hear the buzz about certain presentations and how people are interpreting this data, similar to how, for example, after the CREST presentations last year, there was a lot of buzz saying, "Well, is this enough? Is this going to move the needle? Is this something we're going to start implementing?" And I'm curious to see how POTOMAC and PATAPSCO fare in that conversation. Is that going to change anybody's mind, hearing some of the newer data? As far as significant changes in the course of one AUA where I'm going to be able to bring something home and do it differently come Tuesday, post-AUA, I don't know, but it'd be exciting to see if that does happen.

Ashish Kamat: Yeah, and that's why you mentioned, of course, the IBCG AUA forum. We try to have these debates on IO, non-IO, radiation, et cetera, mainly to address exactly what you're saying, which is can we actually tell people what they should do when they're home Tuesday, and there's so many courses too, right? There's so many courses, fortunately on TURBT. There's some on appropriate management of non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer. I think there's so much going on the AUA, but you highlighted the ones that I too have on my list as I gotta be at these places.

Bogdana Schmidt: And the AUA is doing this Focus On series this year which I think is new, where they're doing a CME, hour and a half-type session with some experts in the field talking about NMIBC, MIBC, metastatic bladder cancer, and I think they're really trying to get some of these newer updates to be disseminated to an audience, not quite on the plenary stage where you're just hitting the highlights but really having more case-based conversation, so I think that is something that people could take home. If they're having questions about how they're managing these patients in their clinic, maybe attending these sessions will give them a little bit more granularity, a little bit more nuance on how to apply it to their patients.

Ashish Kamat: Yeah. And Dave Benson, who unfortunately is coming up on his term, so won't be able to do this much longer, but he's had some really great ideas like the learning lab, for example, where you're sitting there. It's like what they've taken away a little bit from the robotic arena that you do at EAU, but it's a learning lab. It's right in the middle of the whole exhibit. I think it's great, and I'm really looking forward to it. Bogdana, thank you so much for taking the time. I think, as you said, there's so much going on at the AUA. We are really looking forward to seeing you there, and of course all the presenters.

Bogdana Schmidt: Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be a great AUA 2026.