Research Consortium Aims to Accelerate Progress in Kidney Cancer Management

Eric Jonasch, MD

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

It is critical for congressionally-funded work in the kidney cancer field to continue for the benefit of patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC) and other disease types, according to Eric Jonasch, MD.

Jonasch spoke with CancerNetwork® about a presentation he gave at the 2025 Kidney Cancer Research Summit. As part of his presentation, Jonasch detailed the scope and mission of the Kidney Cancer Research Consortium, a multi-institutional program designed to facilitate mechanistic and scientifically driven clinical trials assessing novel therapeutic strategies across RCC subtypes.

Current initiatives within the consortium include combining standard immunotherapies with novel modalities such as LA3 inhibitors and A2A receptor inhibitors to potentially improve treatment options for patients with RCC. According to Jonasch, next steps for expansion may include the improvement of data collection methods and the development of novel biomarkers. Additionally, Jonasch highlighted key themes from other presentations at the meeting, which emphasized the importance of securing federal funding to aid research efforts and consequently impact patient outcomes.

“The key thing to take home from my presentation and the other presentations is that the distance between spending money on research and then getting benefit for patients with cancer is getting shorter and shorter,” Jonasch stated. “What’s important is that the momentum that’s been gained from this [work] should continue.

Jonasch is a professor in the Department of Genitourinary Medical Oncology of the Division of Cancer Medicine at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

CancerNetwork: What was the background for your presentation “Building the Infrastructure for Discovery: A Clinical Trial Consortium to Accelerate Kidney Cancer Research”?

My presentation was about the Kidney Cancer Research Consortium, which is a Department of Defense [DoD] Kidney Cancer Research Program [KCRP]–funded program. This is the congressionally-designated medical research program, and they then generated a program for RCC 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 about to open. We’ve been excited about the results so far.

What aspects of this clinical trial consortium may help with accelerating kidney cancer research?

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.

What kinds of clinical trials conducted as part of this consortium appear most promising in improving outcomes among patients?

One of the examples of trials, or sets of trials, that is more likely to provide us better answers for better treatments [focus on] our immune-modulating agents. We have a suite of studies where we’re looking at the base immune therapy combinations—for example, ipilimumab [Yervoy] plus nivolumab [Opdivo], or cabozantinib [Cabometyx] plus nivolumab. Then, we’re adding novel agents onto these regimens. For example, we’ve just completed a study with an A2A receptor inhibitor. We’re also now in the midst of doing a study with relatlimab-rmbw, which is the LAG3 inhibitor. We also have another study where we’re using an immunotherapy tyrosine kinase inhibitor backbone, and we’re adding lutetium-177 girentuximab, which is another novel agent. Those are 3 examples of studies where we’re trying to improve on existing study platforms to develop better therapy for patients with RCC.

What are the next steps for expanding the role that this clinical trial consortium can play in advancing kidney cancer research?

There’s a couple of key areas that we can expand. Number one is data collection across institutions. Because we have 7 large institutions—centers of excellence that have a focus on RCC—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 [single] organization to be able to gather enough information on those. 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 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.

This presentation was part of a session titled “From Federal Funding to Patient Impact: Kidney Cancer Research That Delivers.” What other points brought up from this session stood out in terms of kidney cancer research?

There were a number of speakers there who had either novel biomarkers or novel agents that they were developing that were supported by Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs [CDMRP] funding. This work would not have occurred had it not been for that funding. I want to emphasize how critically important it is to continue this funding. These things are going to have a high probability of helping human beings with kidney cancer. It’s an efficient way of taking these federal dollars and translating them into something that has a benefit to patients with cancer, so it’s critical this [work] continues.

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.