Advanced Renal Cell Carcinoma and Pembrolizumab and Lenvatinib Approvals
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Pavlos Msaouel
In this program:
What do the advanced renal cell carcinoma approvals of pembrolizumab and levatinib mean for patients? Watch as Dr. Pavlos Msaouel shares an update about pembrolizumab and levatinib approvals, the status of the kidney cancer treatment toolbox, and his hopes for future treatments.
Transcript
Interviewer:
So what does the approval of the recent medications, and so I'm not going to butcher them by trying to pronounce them, I'll just use one syllable words or to describe...if you can go ahead and elaborate on these, pem is one of those new drugs and lin is the other, so what is the value of those new drugs for...what are the potential value of those new drugs for patients and families living with advanced renal cell carcinoma? And if you don't mind, you can pronounce those words out fully, if you don't mind?
Dr. Pavlos Msaouel:
Yeah, absolutely. Those drugs are pembrolizumab, the trade name is Keytruda and lenvatinib (Tecentriq) the trade name is Lenvima. That combination was indeed recently approved for as a systemic therapy for the treatment of kidney cancer, and this is good news, this is good news for our patients, and from 1992 until 2005, we only had one systemic therapy approved by the FDA for most kidney cancer’s just one. From 2005 onward, we have had now more than 15 systemic therapies, new systemic therapy options approved by the FDA for the treatment of kidney cancer, and this now includes pembrolizumab. Nowadays, we have more tools in our toolbox to help our patients. Of importance recently also, a few days ago, there was for the first time an approval by the FDA for a drug called belzutifan (Welireg) to use in patients with a hereditary syndrome called VHL syndrome that we mentioned before that increases the risk for kidney cancer, this is the hereditary syndrome most commonly associated with kidney cancer, so exciting use overall for our patients, and we hope that the research will continue and will intensify to create more therapies, so that one day we can use all of them.
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