Dr. Grünwald on Tumor Remission in RCC

Viktor Grünwald, MD, PhD, an attending physician at the Hannover Medical School, discusses tumor remission in patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC).

At the European Cancer Congress 2013, Grünwald presented data from a large study that looked at tumor response as a prognostic factor in patents with metastatic RCC. The analysis aimed to determine how the quality of tumor remission and the depth of remission will influence the prognostic outcome of patients. In the trial, data on 2,749 patients were prospectively gathered from Pfizer trials from 2003 to 2011.

The analysis revealed that patients who had superb tumor shrinkage (at least 60%) had excellent outcome in terms of overall survival (OS). However, Grünwald says, this applied to only 10% of the patients studied, so there remains a need to expand the prospect of tumor shrinkage and OS benefit to more patients.