Navigating the Treatment Landscape

Navigating the Treatment Landscape for Advanced-stage Kidney CancerMayer N. Fishman, MD, PhDFor the patient with advanced-stage kidney cancer, deciding on a course of treatment presents diverse choices. The physician must weigh how quickly the cancer is spreading, the pattern of that spread, and relative risks from other medical conditions against the patient’s individual treatment goals and medical needs. In many cases of patients with advanced disease, there are therapies that can realistically be used to meet the goals of longer survival, longer time to disease progression, and tumor shrinkage. While choosing a kidney cancer treatment can be a complex process, it is one in which the patient can and should participate. Patient input may impact the disease in real and significant ways.Once the patient and physician decide to start medical therapy, there is an array of options. As shown in Table 1, such options include FDA-approved agents as well as investigational drugs, and can generally be divided into a just a few general categories:Immunotherapy such as interleukin-2 (IL-2) and interferon-alfa, which are cytokinesImmunotherapy with checkpoint inhibitors, which are newer agents still only available in trials; examples are the drugs that are PD-1 inhibitors[1],[2],[3]Targeted therapies such as medicines that inhibit the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) pathway; most of these agents are commonly known as VEGF receptor-tyrosine kinase inhibitors (VEGFR-TKI)[4]...
Source: Kidney Cancer Association - Category: Urology & Nephrology Source Type: news