Kidney Cancer Research Consortium May Advance Progress in the Field

In a conversation with CancerNetwork® at the 2025 Kidney Cancer Research Summit, Eric Jonasch, MD, outlined the function of the Kidney Cancer Research Consortium, a program designed to facilitate research in diseases such as renal cell carcinoma. Jonasch highlighted the scope and features of the Kidney Cancer Research Consortium as part of a 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, this program includes 7 institutions that collaborate on various hypothesis-testing clinical trials assessing novel therapeutic strategies in kidney cancer. He stated that researchers across these institutions may be able to lead more mechanistic and scientifically driven investigations while leveraging correlative samples and quality-of-life data as part of their efforts.

Transcript:

My presentation today was about the Kidney Cancer Research Consortium, which is a DOD KCRP [US Department of Defense Kidney Cancer Research Program]–funded program. This is the congressionally designated medical research program, and they then generated a program for renal cell carcinoma research, which then had various projects. One of those projects is to generate a research consortium, which I now lead.

This is a 7-institution consortium, and our goal is to be able to run tissue-rich, data-rich, hypothesis-testing clinical trials with novel agents. We’ve been doing this now for over 4 years. We now have a portfolio of 10 clinical trials that have either completed, are in progress, or [are] about to open. We’ve been very excited about the results so far.

What we’re able to do here is ask more mechanistic and scientifically driven questions. We’re able to collect correlative samples like circulating tumor DNA samples, tissue samples, as well as quality-of-life data on these clinical trials. [We can] also then do trial-by-trial comparisons, so we essentially can acquire more information from a smaller number of patients in a [smaller] amount of time.

Reference

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