Early Experience with Anti-PD1 for Advanced Renal Cancer

After 10 years of experience with “next-generation” therapies for advanced renal cancer, we have reached a therapeutic plateau with the use tyrosine-kinase and mTOR-pathway inhibitors. These agents clearly have the potential to affect the natural history of the disease, but at the cost of moderate toxicity and most often a decline in the quality of life from adverse effects. Moreover, these therapies are not curative, and the vast majority of recipients will develop progressive disease.

Now, investigators have conducted an industry-sponsored, phase I study of nivolumab — a fully human PD-1 immune checkpoint–blocking antibody that has demonstrated clinical activity in a range of neoplasms — in 34 patients with metastatic renal cancer. All pat…