Study clarifies best treatments for uncommon kidney cancers

the Oncology Nurse Advisor take:

Researchers at Duke Cancer Institute led a study comparing two biologic therapies used to treat a subset of advanced kidney cancers.

The head-to-head comparison offers clinicians much-needed clarity on the preferred first-line treatment of these cancers.

The study focused on three form of non-clear cell kidney cancers: metastatic papillary, chromophobe, or unclassified. In the study, 108 patients were randomly assigned to receive either everolimus or sunitinib, the two treatments approved for these cancers, until their tumors progressed.

The findings show that sunitinib was superior overall at prolonging the time to tumor regrowth, but at a higher rate of severe toxicity.

Sunitinib was also more effective for papillary-type kidney cancers and for better prognosis patients. Everolimus offered longer median progression-free survival for patients with chromophobe and poor-risk tumors.

In addition, more than 100 study participants donated tumor tissue. The researchers now have the largest repository of non-clear cell kidney cancer tissue to aid in further research toward developing new drugs and identifying biomarkers for the disease.