Renal Cell Carcinoma

General Cancer

Brian I. Rini, MD, discusses atezolizumab and bevacizumab as an effective frontline combination in RCC, as well as PROs with the regimen. 

Charles G. Drake, MD, PhD, director of Genitourinary Oncology at New York Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, discusses his thoughts on whether sunitinib would be more successful as a treatment for patients with renal cell carcinoma if used in the neoadjuvant setting.

Although patients who develop brain metastases from renal cell carcinoma typically have poor outcomes, investigators from Yale University have identified a subset of patients who demonstrated extended survival.¹Those patients with a single metastasis were less likely to develop central nervous system\ recurrence after local therapy. This is an encouraging development because these patients have historically been excluded from participating in clinical trials and receiving aggressive treatment regimens.

According to updated data from the phase I/II PIVOT-02 trial presented at the 2018 ASCO Annual Meeting, the combination of NKTR-214 plus the PD-1 inhibitor nivolumab demonstrated promising antitumor activity in patients with advanced solid tumors, particularly in PD-L1–negative patients.

According to findings from the phase III CARMENA trial presented at the 2018 ASCO Annual Meeting, sunitinib monotherapy demonstrated noninferiority compared with cytoreductive nephrectomy in combination with sunitinib in patients with synchronous metastatic renal cell carcinoma.

Shilpa Gupta, MD, assistant professor of Medicine in the Hematology, Oncology, and Transplantation Division, University of Minnesota, discusses phase Ib and phase II studies of pembrolizumab (Keytruda) with bevacizumab (Avastin) for the treatment of metastatic renal cell carcinoma during the 2018 ASCO Annual Meeting.

Neoadjuvant and adjuvant therapies are being incorporated into the course of treatment for patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC), as these approaches may be able to help reduce the risk of recurrence after surgery, according to David M. Nanus, MD. Tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) and immunotherapy agents especially have demonstrated benefit in the adjuvant setting for patients with high-risk RCC.