Renal Cell Carcinoma Clinical Trials | A Deep Dive into the Latest Advancements
Renal Cell Carcinoma Clinical Trials: A Deep Dive into the Latest Advancements from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What’s the latest in renal cell carcinoma clinical trial news? Expert Dr. Moshe Ornstein from Cleveland Clinic discusses updates on antibody drug conjugates, targeted therapy, checkpoint inhibitors, bispecific antibodies, vascular endothelial growth factor inhibitors, and CAR-T cell clinical trials.
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Transcript:
Lisa Hatfield:
So can you talk about any clinical trials you are excited about, both in the newly diagnosed setting and then the metastatic or recurring setting for kidney cancer, specific clinical trials, and then some of the medications that you had mentioned, are those FDA-approved right now or are those also in clinical…are most of those in clinical trials at the moment?
Dr. Moshe Ornstein:
I think what this goes to show is that, here I am talking to you, and sometimes some of the words are hard to understand. You can imagine a patient with a newly diagnosed kidney cancer, how confusing a lot of this can be. So I’m really happy we’re having this discussion. Everything I had mentioned up until this point is FDA-approved.
And if I am to mention something that is non FDA-approved, I’ll make that caveat. And while we’re talking about non-FDA-approved therapies, let’s talk about some of those new and exciting clinical trials. The way I look at clinical trials, whether it’s in the treatment naive, so a patient who has a newly diagnosed cancer, or in a patient with refractory cancer, meaning cancer that has gotten worse despite some treatment already.
So I look at clinical trials, and I tend to divide them into two different main categories. And I think for patients, this sort of helps categorize them in a neat fashion. One, is looking at those trials that are investigating novel therapies. So we spoke about those immunotherapy checkpoint inhibitors, we spoke about those vascular endothelial growth factor inhibitors, in other words, targeted therapy.
We spoke about this HIF-2α, those are all therapies that we understand the mechanism of action, we understand how they work. So one kind of clinical trial is saying, what’s next? What’s down the road? What’s not an irregular immunotherapy? What’s not a regular targeted therapy? What’s not another HIF-2α drug? What are the novel therapies being investigated? So some of those trials that I’m interested in are trials that are looking at something called bispecifics. So these are singular drugs that sort of have two different targets. We’re looking at cellular therapies. We know these things called CAR-T cells work well in some of other cancers like lymphomas, but is there a role for using this type of novel mechanism in kidney cancer?
Drugs looking at things called antibody drug conjugates, which again, these types of therapies are available in breast cancer, in bladder cancer, in other types of cancer, but not yet in kidney cancer. And that’s kind of the one category of novel mechanisms, novel agents. That’s one class of clinical trials. And the other class of clinical trials is really sort of optimizing the drugs we already have.
So we know that as a general rule, giving immunotherapy plus targeted therapy is better than giving immunotherapy alone. But what about trials looking at giving two immunotherapies plus a targeted therapy? We know that patients either get immunotherapy and immunotherapy, or an immunotherapy and a targeted therapy. What about if we gave two immunotherapies and a targeted therapy? Can three be better than two? So there are trials both in the front-line setting and in the refractory setting, looking at these novel therapies in the one bucket. And then there are also trials looking at these combinations and different ways of mixing and matching therapies that we already have to optimize patient outcomes.
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