Fox Chase Cancer Center researchers find that outcomes of robotic assisted kidney cancer surgery, when performed by experienced surgeons at high volume centers, prove more beneficial to patients when compared to open surgery.

Kidney cancer is typically without symptoms until it has spread to other organs, when it is also the most difficult to treat. Newer chemotherapies show great promise for extending survival during later disease stages, but they can also be highly toxic.

Leading oncologist Professor Tim Eisen has expressed concerns that patients with advanced kidney cancer could be condemned to toxic, barely effective, 20 year-old treatments because the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is likely to rule out using all four of the new treatments it has assessed.

A study of nearly 1,500 patients treated for kidney cancer at UCLA in the last 15 years shows that an aggressive, tailored treatment approach results in better survival rates and uncovered subsets of kidney cancer that behave differently and need to be treated accordingly.

A new discovery may lead to more effective screening and treatment for patients with a difficult to recognize syndrome characterized by tumor-like growths and a high risk of developing specific cancers.

Kidney cancer patients generally have one option for beating their disease: surgery to remove the organ.

Patients in the United States today are now much more likely to be diagnosed with smaller tumors, in the earliest, most treatable stage of kidney cancer than a decade ago, leading to a slightly higher survival rate, according to the results of a national study led by a UC San Diego Medical Center researcher.

New data from an international, multicenter Phase III clinical trial has found that the experimental targeted therapy everolimus (RAD001) significantly delays cancer progression in patients with metastatic kidney cancer whose disease had worsened on other treatments.

This is the first time this intervention has been conducted in Europe, and the second in the world. Thanks to the work of the expert group of Hospital Clнnic de Barcelona, the extirpation of a kidney affected by a malignant tumour through the vagina has been achieved. This fact sets a milestone in the framework of minimally invasive surgery.

Physicians at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have demonstrated that children with bilateral Wilms tumor, a cancer of the kidneys, can retain normal function in both kidneys by undergoing a procedure called bilateral nephron-sparing surgery, even when preoperative scans suggest that the tumors are inoperable.

A new study reveals that the type of surgery a patient with kidney cancer receives depends more on the surgeon’s preference than on the patient’s tumor size, demographic characteristics, or general medical health. The findings indicate that patients with kidney cancer often may not be receiving the most appropriate surgical care.

A new Mayo Clinic study suggests that removing the entire kidney from younger patients with small kidney tumors may lead to decreased overall survival compared with an operation that removes the tumor but leaves the kidney intact. The study will be published in the February issue of the Journal of Urology.