How Biomarkers May Help Guide Kidney Cancer Treatment Earlier

At the 2025 Kidney Cancer Research Summit, Dr. Wenxin (Vincent) Xu sat down for an interview with CURE, in which, he discussed the benefit of using biomarkers to guide treatment for renal cell carcinoma (a type of kidney cancer).

“If you [are able] to know at [ahead of time] that your treatment is not going well, those patients might do much better if you're able to switch tracks early,” Xu emphasized in the interview.

During the conversation, he aimed to explain to patients what KIM-1 is, and how biomarkers like this can be used as a potential therapeutic target to guide kidney cancer treatment more precisely.

Xu is a physician, medical oncologist and clinical trial investigator in the Lank Center Genitourinary Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, as well as an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, both located in Boston.

Transcript

How could KIM-1 be used to guide kidney cancer treatment more precisely in the future?

There are many ways we could imagine using a blood test for kidney cancer, and what I'm going to discuss are not the only ones. Some of the obvious ways this could be helpful are, for example, we know that adjuvant immunotherapy after surgery improves patient survival. But when you really break it down, out of all the patients you're treating with adjuvant immunotherapy, only 8% are patients who are cured and would not have already been cured by the surgery.

It's a small number of patients you're benefiting by treating a large number. Hopefully, if you have a more precise biomarker, we can narrow that down and avoid giving extra treatment to patients who don't need it, and perhaps also figure out which patients are at a really high risk and give additional treatment to prevent recurrence in those patients. So that's just one of many ways a blood test could be useful.

Another way, for example, is if a patient has metastatic kidney cancer and they're being treated with immunotherapy. You can imagine that that patient might want to know earlier — before the usual 12-week scan — whether the treatment is working or not. Because if you could know at three weeks instead of 12 weeks that your treatment is really not going well, those patients might do much better if you're able to switch tracks early.

This piece reflects the author’s personal experience and perspective. For medical advice, please consult your health care provider.

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