GU Cancers 2026 | How could future NK cell therapies be used to treat kidney cancer?
Andrew Johns, MD, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, comments on the potential of natural killer cell therapy in kidney cancer, noting that it will likely be used in the later line setting initially as the optimal dose and molecular modifications are still being explored. The TANKer-70 trial (NCT07072234) is investigating a novel version of CD70 NK cell therapy with a TGF beta receptor knockout, which has not been tested before, and if proven effective, could lead to further refinement and potential combination with other therapies like TKIs or checkpoint inhibitors in earlier lines of treatment. This interview took place at the 2026 ASCO GU Cancers Symposium in San Francisco, CA.
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Transcript
So we know that the majority of clear cell renal cell carcinomas express CD70. And so far there are no FDA-approved treatments that target this protein expression. And so there are a lot of different initiatives taking place around the world to come up with the optimal way of targeting this. And so at MD Anderson, we’ve recently formed the Institute for Cell Therapy Discovery and Innovation...
So we know that the majority of clear cell renal cell carcinomas express CD70. And so far there are no FDA-approved treatments that target this protein expression. And so there are a lot of different initiatives taking place around the world to come up with the optimal way of targeting this. And so at MD Anderson, we’ve recently formed the Institute for Cell Therapy Discovery and Innovation. And really the idea of that is creating platforms where we can produce multiple types of cellular therapies targeting different antigens across cancers. And so one of those initiatives is CAR natural killer cell products targeting CD70. And what we’ve designed basically is an early-phase trial to determine the efficacy of these cells in renal cell carcinoma. And so we know so far, based on experience mostly treating other diseases, that CAR and NK cells do not have the same toxicity profile as CAR T cells, for example. So they’ve been proven very safe so far. And we’re really still working to find the optimal dosing strategy and sequence for this treatment across cancer types, including kidney cancer. And so our trial really has two parts. It’s a dose escalation followed by a dose expansion. So we’ve chosen dose level one as a starting point. Based on toxicity and efficacy, we’ll go up to dose level two and three. And then once we’ve chosen our final dose, we’ll expand to an additional cohort. In total, we’ll treat approximately 20 patients with the final optimal dose that we’ve selected. And based on that, we’ll determine if we have good efficacy to continue to a larger trial or make further modifications to the cell product.
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