Joaquim Bellmunt, MD, PhD
Medical Oncology
Dr Joaquim Bellmunt is presently an 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. His clinical expertise is in urological diseases, particularly prostate, bladder and kidney cancer. He has extensive experience treating prostate and bladder cancer patients and has been a key investigator in several trials conducted in this patient population.
He has 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 led 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 have been to be the lead investigator of the phase III randomized study of vinflunine versus BSC and of the pembrolizumab versus chemotherapy that both led to the approval for these agents in the second line. The last trial is a landmark trial showing survival superiority for immunotherapy versus chemotherapy. The results of this last study were published in the NEJM (Bellmunt J, N Engl J Med. 2017). He has also been the PI of the IMvigor 010 study (adjuvant atezolizumab in bladder cancer) that led to the identification of ctDNA utility for MRD monitoring in bladder cancer. He is the co-author of the Javelin 100 study that has led to the recent approval of maintenance avelumab. He is a member of SEOM, SOGUG, ASCO and ESMO.
