Research Round Up Podcasts: Melanoma and Kidney Cancer

Source: Cancer.net, July 2015

Next up in our Research Round Up podcast series, you’ll hear highlights from the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting about kidney cancer and melanoma.

One theme between these two podcasts is the use of combination immunotherapy treatment. Used first for melanoma, doctors are looking at how to use ipilimumab (Yervoy) and nivolumab (Opdivo) for both melanoma and kidney cancer. This combination is promising, but treating cancer with two drugs instead of one sometimes brings additional side effects. More research needs to be done to help patients get the benefits of these drugs while lessening the side effects.

Research Round Up – Kidney Cancer

Brian I. Rini, MD, from the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Institute discusses research news that caught his attention.  He touches on:

• Research on checkpoint inhibitors, which boost the immune system’s ability to destroy cancer cells [1:50]
• Approaches for treating non-clear cell kidney cancer, a rare subtype of kidney cancer [7:51]
• A study looking at combinations of existing kidney cancer drugs, with promising results [10:03]