Upper urinary tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC) is a malignant tumor originated from the epithelium of upper urinary tract (renal pelvis and ureter). The standard treatment of UTUC is radical nephroureterectomy with ipsilateral bladder cuff excision. For locally advanced disease, neoadjuvant chemotherapy or adjuvant chemotherapy with radiotherapy is also a considerable treatment. In general, patients with UTUC are often diagnosed in a late stage with a poor survival.~Nowadays, immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) emerged huge success in treatment of various type of cancers, including metastatic urothelial carcinoma. Several anti-PD1 or PD-L1 agents demonstrated an exciting response for metastatic urothelial carcinoma. The encouraging success makes clinical trials moving forward to neoadjuvant setting. In the PURE-01 study, patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer received 3 cycles of neoadjuvant pembrolizumab achieving 39.5% pathological complete response (pCR). It brought a brand-new hope for organ-preservation treatment strategy. So far, neoadjuvant ICI has not been tested in patients with UTUC, irrespective for treatment efficacy or safety analysis. More importantly, there is still lack of reliable biomarkers to predict treatment response of ICI, which definitely an unmet medical need in clinical practice.~Therefore, the investigators proposed a phase II, open-label study of neoadjuvant nivolumab in locally advanced UTUC. Investigators believe that neoadjuvant nivolumab will achieve at least similar pCR rate compared with neoadjuvant pembrolizumab in UCB patients. Furthermore, investigators will conduct a comprehensive exploratory genomic analysis to identify the potential candidate biomarkers to predict the response of nivolumab.
The aim of this study is to explore efficacy and safety of neoadjuvant nivolumab for non-metastatic upper tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC), and explore the potential predictive biomarkers of immunotherapy.