What Are Common Therapy Options for Kidney Cancer?
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Pavlos Msaouel
In this program:
What kidney cancer treatment options might patients receive? Watch as Dr. Pavlos Msaouel provides an overview of common therapies, types of kidney cancer they are used in, and how the treatments work against kidney cancer.
Transcript
Interviewer:
So sometimes the obstacles patients face limit their access to treatments. Can you give us an overview of the treatment landscape for kidney cancer? And also, what are some of the modalities being used to treat kidney cancer?
Dr. Pavlos Msaouel:
Yes, absolutely. So in oncology cancer medicine, we...the doctors will treat cancer, we have two broad types of there, the first one is what we call localized therapies for local therapies, those are the therapies that address the cancer in a specific area, so surgery, for example is a localized therapy, you cut out the cancer in the specific area that you're able to see. Radiation is also a localized therapy, you irradiated a specific area, or you may burn the cancer or you may freeze it, there are multiple ways to address it with a localized therapy approach. We most often localize the process like surgery when a patient has earlier states in the cancer, but sometimes we may use it even if somebody has a stage IV kidney cancer. The second broad type of therapy that we use is what we call systemic therapies, and that comes from the word system, and those are the therapies that go all over our bodies to recognize cancer cells, and there are three major types of systemic therapies that we use in kidney cancer, the first one is what we call chemotherapy, classic old school chemotherapy that everybody knows about. This type of therapy, this type of systemic therapy does not work against the vast majority of kidney cancers, but it does work against some of them, like renal medullary carcinoma that we mentioned before. And so this is why it's so important to know exactly the type of kidney cancer that you have, because that helps guide our treatment.
The second type of systemic therapy that we use is what we call immunotherapy, and this one is usually given through an IV, and what immunotherapy does is it stimulates the body's immune system to recognize and kill cancer cells, and immunotherapy works against many kidney cancers, including the most common one clear cell kidney cancer, it's a good therapy for that type of cancer. Doesn't always work, no therapy works 100 percent, but it can work in a large number of patients. The last systemic therapy that we often use in patients with kidney cancer is what we call targeted therapies, those often come in the form of pills, and those pills contain drugs that are designed to target, hence the name targeted therapies, certain molecules that the kidney cancer cells express, so that those are our most common therapy options for kidney cancer.
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