Immunotherapy for kidney cancer

My mother has got kidney cancer and is going to have immunotherapy treatment. What does this mean?

Immunotherapy is a type of biological therapy. Biological therapy is treatment with substances usually produced naturally by the body. They work by encouraging the body's natural defence system - the immune system - to attack cancer cells. There are two biological therapies doctors use to treat people with kidney cancer

  • Interferon alpha (IFN)
  • Aldesleukin (IL-2)

Both of these are made naturally as part of the body’s immune response. But now they can be made in the laboratory and used in much larger quantities as treatments for cancer and other diseases. There is information on interferon alpha, on aldesleukin (IL-2), and on other biological therapies in the treating kidney cancer section of CancerHelp UK.

Your mother may be having biological therapy for her kidney cancer because her cancer

  • Has already spread to other parts of her body or
  • It is at high risk of coming back after the kidney cancer has been removed surgically

These treatments are now accepted for advanced kidney cancer. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE ) say that immunotherapies should be available to any patient with kidney cancer that has spread. Normally this would be interferon, which generally has less severe side effects than IL-2. Some people respond better to these drugs than others. For most people, the best that we can hope for with this treatment is for the cancer to shrink for a time. Even so, at least two clinical trials have shown that treatments based on interferon can help patients with advanced kidney cancer to live longer.

Interferon and IL-2 are now being investigated as treatment to help prevent a cancer from coming back after surgery. Doctors call this adjuvant treatment. There is information on CancerHelp UK on kidney cancer surgery.

Doctors are also researching new types of biological therapies. This is an important and active area of kidney cancer research. Treatments include the newer biological therapies such as sunitinib and sorafenib. There is also research into vaccines for kidney cancer. There is more information about many of these types of treatments in our kidney cancer research page.

Your mother’s specialist may ask her to take part in a clinical trial. To find out about current trials for kidney cancer, you can look at our clinical trials database. Click on this link, then pick 'kidney' from the dropdown menu of cancer types and click find.