Clinical Medicine Insights: Therapeutics

Kidney cancer is the most lethal of the genitourinary malignancies. Prior to the advent of cytokine-based immunotherapy 25 years ago, surgery was the only viable treatment for advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC). Adjuvant therapy with interferon and interleukin-2 revolutionized the treatment paradigm, although responders were too often uncommon. The mid-portion of the last decade saw born a new class of drugs aimed at the angiogenesis/VEGF pathway, common to most clear-cell RCC. The latest FDA-approved compound in this class has promised to yield equal or better first-line efficacy as its predecessors while, perhaps, providing better tolerability. Here we review the available data at present regarding pazopanib.