Targeted Therapy with Sunitinib, Demonstrates Significant Benefit Compared to Standard Treatment of Advanced Kidney Cancer
Metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC) or advanced kidney cancer’s initial therapy is the current standard cytokine treatment. In a new study from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the drug sunitinib malate (Sutentｮ) was found more effective than the current standard treatment in treating advanced kidney cancer.
“This drug has shown more activity as a single agent against advanced kidney cancer than any other drug I’ve studied in the past 15 years,” said the study’s lead author Robert J. Motzer, MD, a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). “I continue to be encouraged by its effectiveness in treating patients with this aggressive disease,” said Dr. Motzer, who is a leader in the treatment of kidney cancer and conducted the earliest clinical trials on sunitinib (initially referred to as SU11248).
One of the standard treatments for advanced kidney cancer is interferon-alpha (IFN-ﾜ), but only about 15% of patients respond to this immunotherapy. Sunitinib on the other hand targets receptors on kidney cancer cells that may play a role in tumor growth and the development of blood vessels that feed a tumor.
Sunitinib in previous studies have shown to shrink some renal cancers but this new study is the first to demonstrate the effectiveness of sunitinib as a first-line therapy compared with standard cytokine therapy with IFN-ﾜ.
Read more at MSKCC.
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