President Signs Bill with $50M for Kidney Cancer Research
On December 30, President Biden signed the FY2023 Omnibus Bill, which includes $50 million for the Kidney Cancer Research Program for this fiscal year ending on September 30, 2023. That brings the total funding for kidney cancer research, since 2006 when ACKC...
Triplet Therapy for Kidney Cancer
Dr. Toni Choueiri, the principal investigator, from Dana Farber Institute, presented the results of the much-anticipated Phase III trial, COSMIC-313, at the 2022 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Conference in Paris. COSMIC-313 is the first triplet drug...
Therapies to Treat Metastatic RCC in Clear Cell Patients
The following is a summary extracted from a set of guidelines issued during 2022 by the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO) on how to medically treat metastatic kidney cancer for patients who have clear cell carcinoma (ccRCC). The guidelines were...
ACKC Awards $50,000 Research Grant
In August of 2022, Action to Cure Kidney Cancer awarded a $50,000 grant to support the work of the National Cancer Institute’s Urologic Oncology Branch, specifically target toward kidney cancer. In the words of W. Marston Linehan, the Chief of the Branch:...
Cigarette Smoking Leads to 2 Million Person-Years of Lost Life
A study done by researchers working for the American Cancer Society (ACS), found that 30% of the cancer deaths in the U.S., or over 122,000 smokers in 2019, were caused by cigarette smoking. Further, smoking led to over two million total person-years of lost life...
High Cost of Cancer Drugs
In 2006, Mike from Pennsylvania was diagnosed with advanced kidney cancer that had spread to his ribs. His doctor prescribed Sutent (sunitinib), at the time, a newly approved Pfizer drug, which cost $179 for a 50 mg pill. The dosage for Sutent is one pill daily...
Patient Survival and COVID-19 Vaccines
A group of researchers and doctors belonging to the OnCovid Study Group published a retrospective study of survival rate and other factors, in Europe, of vaccinated versus unvaccinated cancer patients. The article was published in the June 2, 2022 issue of Lancet...
Funding Kidney Cancer Research: A Story of Persistence and Luck
It is said that in order to succeed one must be persistent and be prepared to take advantage of opportunities when they arise. ACKC’s decades-long effort to obtain Federal funding for kidney cancer research confirms the wisdom of that approach. Here’s the story. In...
Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) as an Adjutant Therapy for RCC
Oncologists generally prescribe adjuvant therapy to patients who not only have been diagnosed and treated for their disease but, also have a high probability that the disease will return. For example, in women with hormone-receptor-positive (HR+), the most common...
Water Contamination in Parkersburg, WV
This story begins in October 1996 on Wilbur Earl Tennant’s farm outside of Parkersburg, WV, a town of 30,000 people located across the Ohio River from Ohio. For decades, Earl raised beef cattle on his 300-acre spread. For the last two years, he noticed with alarm...
PFOA and Kidney Cancer: The Slippery Slope from Tap to Tumor
It was 2014. Michael Hickey wanted to sleep at night. He had uncovered a terrible truth that meant accusing the biggest employer, Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, in the small, upstate New York town of Hoosick Falls, of polluting their drinking water. His friends...
The Median Isn’t the Message
Editor’s Note: The following is an essay by Stephen J. Gould, a leading evolutionary biologist on the faculties of Harvard and New York University. In 1982, he was diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma and found out through his research into the disease that the...
ACKC Awarded GuideStar Gold
We are pleased to announce that Action to Cure Kidney Cancer has achieved Gold status with GuideStar, the organization maintaining the most complete information on 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations. Each year, millions of people look to GuideStar to make decisions...
William Kaelin Wins Nobel Prize in Medicine
Reposted from October 2019 — William Kaelin, Dana Farber Institute, Boston, and two other scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine today for their work on the body’s awareness and response to the level of oxygen available to its cells, especially low...
Nivolumab and Ipilimumab Approved for Kidney Cancer
From October 2014 through June 2017, Bristol-Myers Squibb sponsored a Stage III trial, called CheckMate 214 (NCT02231749 on clinicaltrials.gov), testing the combination of therapies nivolumab (Opdivo) and ipilimumab (Yervoy) against sunitnib (Sutent) in...
FDA Approves Avelumab Plus Axitinib Versus Sunitinib
Introduction The FDA approved the combination therapy avelumab and axitinib for first-line treatment of metastatic kidney cancer patients on May 14, 2019 based on the results of a Phase III trial, Javelin 101 Renal, led by Toni Choueiri of Dana Farber Institute,...
Combination Therapy Pembrolizumab/Axitinib Outperforms Sunitinib
In a report delivered by Thomas Powles, from Queen Mary University, London, the combination therapy of pembrolizumab (Keytruda) and axitinib (Inlyta) had a superior performance, in a 861-patient trial, to sunitinib (Sutent), the current standard of care therapy...
