Renal cancer articles from across Nature Portfolio

In a double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 2 trial in patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma treated with anti-PD-1 plus a VEGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor, donor fecal microbial transplantation (FMT) from complete responders to immunotherapy did not significantly improve the primary endpoint of 12-month progression-free survival (PFS) but did significantly improve median PFS versus placebo FMT.

In a phase 1 trial testing healthy donor fecal microbial transplantation with immune checkpoint blockade in patients with previously untreated renal cell carcinoma, treatment was safe with an encouraging response signal and microbiome analyses, suggesting specific donor taxa associations with toxicity.

In this Review, the authors examine anticipated patterns of late morbidities that could emerge as a result of current treatments for Wilms tumour. Given the importance of a patient-centred follow-up strategy, they propose a practical classification system based on the likelihood of developing therapy-related late sequelae.

Horvat-Menih et al. use hyperpolarised 13C-pyruvate MRI (HP 13C-MRI) to assess 13C-lactate generation in a patient with a fumarate hydratase-deficient renal cell carcinoma (FHd-RCC), and correlate imaging findings with genetic and metabolic analysis on post-operative tissue samples. HP 13C-MRI reveals two metabolically distinct tumour regions.

Lyons et al. explored the rules of specificity and function for condensates formed by oncogenic fusion proteins, and identified a common molecular signature in these oncoproteins that compartmentalizes RNA polymerase II to confer an increase in gene activation and consequent cancer phenotypes.

The first study of personalized cancer vaccines for renal cell carcinoma with breakthrough results in the adjuvant setting has been published, showing a 100% efficacy rate and negligible toxic effects. However, important questions remain concerning long-term effectiveness.

In this study, Alexander et al. find that HIF2α regulates speckle–DNA associations to fine-tune the expression of a subset of its target genes, and demonstrate that speckle phenotypes correlate with outcomes in renal cell carcinoma.