Christine Lehmann, MA

The results of several studies presented at the 2019 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium confirmed that the combination of PD-1/PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitors with tyrosine kinase inhibitors of the VEGF pathway was superior to VEGF inhibitors alone in patients with clear cell renal cell carcinoma, which accounts for about 70% of patients with kidney cancer.

Precision medicine has produced some dramatic successes in patients with advanced cancer. With developments in molecular profiling, targeted therapies are being applied to multiple tumors, most notably in advanced melanoma, NSCLC, and several types of leukemia. Alison Schram, MD, and David M. Hyman, MD, point out the challenges in determining the proportion of patients who will benefit from receiving targeted therapies.

Until recently, few systemic therapies had been approved for the treatment of patients with liver cancer, as few agents could demonstrate significant benefit over placebo. Sorafenib was the first systemic therapy that extended median overall survival over placebo by nearly 3 months,¹ and, in December 2007, it became the first systemic therapy approved by the FDA for patients with unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma.