How to Participate in Clinical Trials for Kidney Cancer

It is fortunate that, in a majority of cases, kidney cancer is caught before spreading to other parts of the body. For these patients, treatment usually involves a nephrectomy, which is the surgical removal of one or both of the kidneys. The goal of the surgery is to prevent the cancer from metastasizing. Unfortunately, many people who undergo a nephrectomy for high-risk disease—between 20% to 50%, according to recent estimates—will eventually go on to develop metastatic cancer. Until recently, there wasn’t much a person’s care team could do in this situation to stop the cancer from coming back. Reliably effective “adjuvant” immune therapies—something added to surgery to prevent the cancer’s return—had not yet been identified. But in 2021, the New England Journal of Medicine published the results of a groundbreaking clinical trial. The trial involved roughly 1,000 people undergoing nephrectomy who were at high risk for cancer recurrence. About half of the people took a placebo pill, while the other half took a kidney cancer drug called pembrolizumab. Pembrolizumab is an immune checkpoint inhibitor—a type of immunotherapy drug that stimulates the immune system to fight cancer cells. After two years of follow-up, the people in the trial who took the immunotherapy drug were significantly less likely to have had a cancer recurrence than those taking the placebo. A few months later, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Cancer healthscienceclimate Source Type: news