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Hello, my name is David
McDermott and I'm
a Medical Oncologist
here in Boston
at Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center.
My talk today is
entitled "Making
Cures More Common
in Kidney Cancer".
Over the last 15 years,
few areas in oncology have seen
more progress than the treatment
of advanced kidney cancer,
due in large part to
the effective application
of immunotherapy.
However, over the last year,
you could make a
strong argument that
things haven't gone well for
immunetherapy in kidney cancer.
During my talk, I
hope to convince
you that to get our
field back on track,
advocates for immunotherapy will
need to refocus on
the field's roots,
which were the rational
application of
immunotherapies to patients
most likely to benefit.
We'll also need to
develop therapies that
generate more remissions
and ultimately cures.
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Here are my disclosures.
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I've divided my talk
into three parts.
In the second section, I will
talk about how my colleagues are
developing new tools to
measure an important
goal of our patients,
remission of their
kidney cancer.
In the third section, I'll
talk about how our team at
the Dana Farber
Harvard Cancer Center
is exploiting a growing
understanding of
the kidney cancer
tumor micro environment to
develop therapies that might
make remissions more common.
I first started treating
patients over 25 years ago when
the median survival
for our patients with
metastatic kidney cancer
was less than one year.
Thanks to team efforts of
patient advocacy groups,
partners in industry,
researchers in basic
translational clinical science,
and most importantly, our brave
patients and their families;
median survival is now
close to five years,
with patients presenting
with metastatic disease.
This improvement is due,
in large part, to the durable
benefit seen with immunotherapy.
Let's start with a
brief history of
its application in solid tumors.
