Contemporary Research on Renal Cell Carcinoma : Basic and Clinical Developments

The management of advanced renal cell carcinoma is still problematic. Surgery, although the therapy of choice for locally advanced renal tumors, is still controversial as the treatment for metastases. The role of surgery in the management of patients with pulmonary, bony, and liver metastasis is one of the subject matters discussed in this book. Our results with series of patients undergoing resection of metastases from the lung, bone, and liver show that surgery may be appropriate in selected patients with a good performance status, although most of them certainly cannot be cured by this procedure alone, i.e., in the absence of effective adjuvant therapies. As recent developments show, new strategies for immunotherapy of renal cell carcinoma represent a modest advance over traditional approaches in the treatment of this cancer, such as chemo- and radiotherapy. Clinical trials employing recombinant interferon-a and interleukin 2 produced response rates in up to 30% of patients treated, as evidenced by the European Immunotherapy Trials Program. The adverse reactions and the lack of efficacy in the majority of patients warrants the search for new immunotherapeutic approaches.