Metastatic Kidney Cancer Treatment

Innovative treatment options for cancer that has spread outside of the kidney.

Kidney cancer that has spread elsewhere in your body – most commonly to the lungs, liver, lymph nodes, brain or bones – is known as metastatic kidney cancer. It is more difficult to treat than kidney cancer that is completely within the kidney. But you still have several treatment options, including:

• Advanced chemotherapy treatments that use several medicines to help shrink kidney cancer tumors. You can take some of these medications in pill form. Others are injectable immunotherapy treatments.
• Surgery to remove the kidney that may offer survival benefits for patients with advanced kidney cancer.
• Minimally invasive robotic kidney surgery
• Clinical trials that offer additional options to treat metastatic kidney cancer. You will meet with medical oncologist Clara Hwang, M.D. to determine if a clinical trial may be the right fit for you.

First-in-world treatment

Our team continues to investigate new treatments for metastatic kidney cancer. In 2015, interventional radiologist Scott Schwartz, M.D. was the first doctor in the world to perform a new procedure that involved suctioning a kidney cancer tumor from a patient’s vena cava (a vein that carries blood into the heart).

The patient then underwent minimally invasive kidney removal surgery and participated in a clinical trial. This clinical trial used genetic material from the patient’s tumor to produce a vaccine to fight the metastatic kidney cancer.