Curie Brief
Turn on cookies to sign in
Signing in saves your progress to your Curie account. We can only do that with cookies on — turn them on to continue.
News
Immunotherapy combinations are pulling ahead in advanced kidney cancer. A large real-world study found that patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC) who received an IO-TKI combo lived a median of 44.1 months — nearly 15 months longer than those on TKI monotherapy alone. The shift toward IO-based combos as first-line treatment has been steadily growing since 2019.
Immunotherapy-based combinations are becoming the go-to first-line treatment for advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC) — and real-world data now back up the survival benefit. A retrospective study of over 2,100 patients presented at the 2026 Kidney Cancer Research Summit found that IO-TKI combos delivered a median overall survival (OS) of 44.1 months, compared to 32.8 months for IO-IO combos and 29.8 months for TKI monotherapy. The trend is clear: IO-TKI use jumped from 33.8% to 48.6% of patients between 2019 and 2024, while TKI monotherapy dropped from 25.7% to 16.9%.
Beyond survival, the study also tracked healthcare costs and resource use. IO-TKI therapy carried the highest total monthly costs at $38,408 per patient, driven largely by pharmacy spending, while TKI monotherapy was the least expensive at $24,098/month. In later lines of therapy, TKI monotherapy remained the most commonly used treatment.
By the Numbers
Why it matters: This real-world data reinforces what clinical trials have suggested — IO-based combos, especially IO-TKI, offer a meaningful survival advantage in advanced RCC. For oncologists, it also highlights the trade-off between improved outcomes and substantially higher treatment costs.
