Dr. Jonasch on recent pivotal advances in renal cell carcinoma

“This is the first study to show a statistically significant and clinically meaningful survival improvement with any adjuvant therapy in kidney cancer, and this further supports adjuvant pembrolizumab as a standard of care after surgery in this disease setting,” says Toni K. Choueiri, MD.

The approval is based on findings from the phase 3 RENOTORCH trial, which showed that toripalimab plus axitinib prolonged progression-free survival and improved the objective response rate in patients with advanced RCC compared with sunitinib.

“Our trial presents the first and the longest durable response we have seen with an allogeneic, off-the-shelf, CAR T cell therapy in the treatment of refractory solid tumors," says Samer A. Srour, MB ChB, MS.

In the monotherapy cohort of TPST-1120, 53% of patients achieved a best response of stable disease, with 5 of those patients remaining on treatment for more than 5 months.

Treatment with stereotactic ablative body radiotherapy resulted in no observed local failures or cancer-related deaths among patients with primary renal cell cancer.

“The take-home message is: Don’t assume bad things if the tumor is growing during chemotherapy," says Andrew M. Davidoff, MD.