Moving Forward With Adjuvant Therapies in RCC

Chung-Han Lee, MD, PhD, vice president of early clinical development at Exelixis, discusses the types of research that are needed to push forward the development of adjuvant treatments for patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC).

According to Lee, the space is in need of better predictive markers on whether or not patients have reccurrent disease, improved methods of determining which patients will respond to treatment, and the ability to predict who may develop toxicities.

TRANSCRIPTION:

0:10 | I think that there are multiple steps in which we can move this forward. One is coming up with better predictive markers on whether or not people have recurrent disease. Right now, most of the ways that we've predicted nomograms have been strictly clinical, and based on the pathology report, based off of some clinical features of the patients, and then the surgical pathology and seeing what that looks like, the size, and the grade.

0:42 | One of the things that would be interesting to move forward is now that we've developed so many prognostic markers from the genomic sort of sense, whether or not any of that can be integrated into the nomograms to help predict your risk recurrence. If we can predict with better accuracy, that will also help us better stratify patients. That's 1 component that's going to be beneficial.

1:10 | The second second part that would be beneficial is to get a better sense of predicting who might respond to treatments. If we can predict even that with better accuracy, then again, we can move the needle a bit more forward in terms of those types of treatment algorithms. The other part is our ability to predict who might develop toxicity. I think that working on all 3 of these fronts are going to be critical for defining the patients that would benefit the most.