Dr Sumanta Pal speaks to ecancer about his study from ASCO GU 2021 which was about investigating cabozantinib as the most effective treatment for metastatic papillary kidney cancer.

He initially talks about the rationale behind his study. He says that in this study 147 eligible patients with papillary kidney cancer, most of whom had not received any prior treatment were studied. Patients were randomly assigned to one of four treatment groups - those who took sunitinib and those who took one of the three MET target drugs - cabozantinib, crizotinib, and savolitinib.

He then talks about the key results from this study saying that patients receiving sunitinib went a median of 5.6 months before their cancer progressed; patients receiving savolitinib and crizotinib fared much worse overall. But cabozantinib, which inhibits VEGF receptors and AXL in addition to MET, gave patients a median of 9.2 months before their cancer progressed. In addition, 23% of patients had a significant reduction in the size of their tumour with cabozantinib. In contrast, only 4% of patients saw this kind of tumour response with sunitinib.

In the end, he talks about the future impact of this study on treatment and research.