GU Cancers 2018 | Novel drugs for patients with renal cell carcinoma
Here, Francesco Montorsi, MD, from Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, Italy, speaks at the 2018 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium, held in San Francisco, CA, about how the outcome of patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC) could potentially be improved, with promising emerging data on novel therapies. Prof. Montorsi speaks about his experience as a physician, and how both patients with localized renal cancer and those with aggressive disease tend to have a poor prognosis, which highlights the need for novel drug studies that could improve patient outcomes. Prof. Montorsi concludes that drugs which target the immune system have been particularly effective in treating patients with metastatic RCC.
Transcript (edited for clarity)
With regard to renal cell carcinoma, I will share my perspective as a urologist. In my everyday practice, I see patients who come in with the diagnosis of renal cancer having localized disease and patients who come in sometimes completely asymptomatic. When they receive their first CT scan of the abdomen, we find the disease has completely diffused.
The use of drugs is important in two settings: when you take out a kidney or when you partially remove a lesion from the kidney and it shows aggressive disease or one lymph node is positive...
With regard to renal cell carcinoma, I will share my perspective as a urologist. In my everyday practice, I see patients who come in with the diagnosis of renal cancer having localized disease and patients who come in sometimes completely asymptomatic. When they receive their first CT scan of the abdomen, we find the disease has completely diffused.
The use of drugs is important in two settings: when you take out a kidney or when you partially remove a lesion from the kidney and it shows aggressive disease or one lymph node is positive. We know that the final prognosis for that patient is bad and we would like to have results of studies suggesting that one drug, if administered, is going to improve the final prognosis of the patient. This was not true until several months ago where there were studies done with different types of drugs, specifically sunitinib, that would suggest that perhaps there is a positive result. However the studies were conflicting. In this meeting we were presented with the results of a study which was suggesting that some of the patients can benefit from these drugs. It is a major advance which means that once the surgical part of the treatment has been done, if the patient is in a dangerous condition, they can be helped in that way.
The second setting which is something that is dealt specifically with by the medical oncologists are patients who develop metastatic disease. There are a number of drugs that can be used. The use of drugs which are dealing with the patient’s immune system have given excellent results, specifically the combination of two drugs. There is a lot of emerging new data in this area, and not only for kidney cancer but also for prostate cancer. It’s interesting to see that the panorama of medical treatment is expanding and hopefully this will bring be bring back new opportunities for our patients.
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