Gennady Bratslavsky, MD, Discusses Future of Surgery in RCC

During the 15th Annual Interdisciplinary Prostate Cancer Congress® and Other Genitourinary Malignancies, CancerNetwork® spoke with Gennady Bratslavsky, MD, professor and chair of Urology and director of the Prostate Cancer Program at Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse, New York, about the evolving landscape of renal cell carcinoma and the role that surgery plays in it.

Transcript:

This is an evolving landscape. We are going to try to operate less on patients who we can avoid surgery, we’re going to try to prognosticate better and see who can be spared. The term such as intervention-free survival is something that hopefully will be used more and more. Some trials are being designed, for example, in a role for renal biopsy where type of surgery or timing of surgery may be affected.

The role of surgery for more advanced disease is also ever changing. Obviously, the dogma that every metastatic kidney cancer can be removed is wrong. I still think that there will be appropriately selected patients where surgery will remain the first and potentially the main type of treatment and that we may even include metastasectomy that has been used for years. This can still render patients disease free and offer a durable long-term survival.