Braun Discusses the Role of Biomarkers in RCC

Biomarkers play a crucial role in the management of renal cell carcinoma (RCC). These biological molecules can provide valuable information about the disease's progression, prognosis, and potential response to treatment.

For the oncologist, biomarkers play an important role in treatment planning, prognosis, treatment selection, and monitoring disease progression. With advances in research identifying novel biomarkers. As research continues to advance, new biomarkers are being discovered and their clinical utility is being explored. The use of biomarkers in RCC has the potential to improve patient outcomes by enabling more personalized and effective treatments.

Here, David Braun, MD, PhD, Yale Cancer Center, discusses how biomarkers are evolving for the treatment of renal cell carcinoma.

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0:05 | I think there are so many areas where biomarkers could be helpful. One of the classic ones is which drug is the right drug for each individual patient. So for a patient in front of me in the clinic, I can't confidently say one treatment regimen is definitely going to work or definitely not going to work. A lot of it is trial and error and extrapolating from data. So one is helping to choose the right drugs for the right patient.

0:27 | Another important area is, does a patient need drugs at all? They need therapy, and this is really a question the adjuvant setting, so patient who's had surgery to remove, for instance, a high-risk tumor. And we, right now, we have clinical tools, but we have really no biomarker to say this is likely or unlikely for this thing to come back. And if it's likely, it's something that has a high potential to benefit from an adjuvant therapy. And the last possibility I'll mention—certainly there are others—is prediction of toxicity. This is really a patient-oriented issue. We know that lots of patients with immune-based therapies get these often severe immune related toxicities, and we have no way of knowing up front who is going to be the most susceptible to them. And so predicting toxicity, not just which therapy to use, is also important.