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Researchers have developed a promising treatment for patients with advanced renal cell cancer. By combining chemotherapy with treatment using cytokines called interferon-alpha and interleukin-2, they may have extended patients’ lives, according to a report in the September Journal of Urology (Vol. 168, No. 3: 956-958).
Once renal cell cancer has spread outside the kidney, it is usually incurable. Most patients die within a year.
Today’s Treatments Are Inadequate
Treatment with chemotherapy has generally been unsuccessful. In the 1980s, new drugs called cytokines were introduced. These are naturally occurring substances that can be made in labs. The two cytokines that have been used for treating renal cell cancer are called interferon-alpha and interleukin-2.
Both of these drugs have had some success in treating this cancer. They can be used alone or combined. However, the doses that can be used are limited because these drugs can cause major side effects. Severe fatigue, appetite loss, and flu-like symptoms are examples.
In order to boost the effect of these drugs, researchers at medical centers in Florence and Milan added a chemotherapy drug called gemcitabine.
Better Than Expected Response
The Italian researchers treated 19 patients with all three drugs for a total of six months. If patients responded, the treatment was continued for another six months. Most of their patients had renal cell cancer that had spread to two or more sites in the body. All of the patients had had their cancerous kidney removed.
In about one-fourth of their patients, the cancer shrunk to less than half its original size. In another 50% of patients, the cancer stopped progressing. The most promising result was that the median survival was 20 months, with half the patients lived longer than 20 months. This is longer than most reported studies.
The researchers said that the side effects were low, with some fatigue and flu-like symptoms. The patients were able to tolerate the treatment and continued on it for its full length.
Only a small number of patients were treated, so the researchers recommended that more people be studied. The final studies that will need to be done are clinical trials that compare this treatment with drugs currently in use.
According to the American Cancer Society nearly 30,000 people in the US will be diagnosed with renal cell cancer this year, and approximately 10,000 people will die of this disease.
ACS News Center stories are provided as a source of cancer-related
news and are not intended to be used as
press releases.
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