Expanding Key Kidney Cancer Research Areas Via Institutional Collaboration

As part of a discussion with CancerNetwork^® at the 2025 Kidney Cancer Research Summit, Eric Jonasch, MD, detailed potential future initiatives in the Kidney Cancer Research Consortium, a collaborative program across 7 institutions that he leads to advance research efforts in the kidney cancer field. Jonasch spoke about the mission and scope of the Kidney Cancer Research Consortium in an oral presentation at the meeting.

According to Jonasch, a professor in the Department of Genitourinary Medical Oncology of the Division of Cancer Medicine at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, one consideration related to the expansion of real-world data collection across institutions participating in the consortium. Additionally, he noted that the program may be able to advance its development of various “interesting and promising” biomarkers. Finally, he highlighted the necessity of forming additional industry partnerships to facilitate clinical trials assessing novel therapeutic strategies in the management of kidney cancer.

Transcript:

There’s a couple of key areas that we can really expand. Number one is data collection across institutions. Because of the fact that we have 7 large institutions—centers of excellence that have a focus on renal cell carcinoma—this will allow us to expand our database on rare kidney cancers, which there is a fairly large number of fairly rare tumors. It’s extremely difficult for any one organization to be able to gather enough information on those. Just from a real-world data collection perspective, we can do that.

The second thing is going to be biomarker development. There are some interesting and promising biomarkers, but I think that we are very well positioned to also expand our biomarker portfolio.

The third thing is going to be partnering with industry where we have early development assets [to] start working on not just looking at how to repurpose existing agents, but to be able to, from the ground up, work on developing novel agents in the context of this group of centers that can move these trials forward more efficiently.

Reference

Jonasch E. Building the infrastructure for discovery: a clinical trial consortium to accelerate kidney cancer research. Presented at the 2025 Kidney Cancer Research Summit; July 17-18, 2025; Boston, MA.