KCA Holds Groundbreaking Workshop to Accelerate Kidney Cancer Research
The Kidney Cancer Association (KCA) hosted the first-ever workshop to gather leading researchers from around the world, including two Nobel Prize winners, and discuss how to accelerate kidney cancer research at the preclinical stage to better understand this cancer and bring better treatments and diagnostic tools to patients.
The Renal Cell Carcinoma (RCC) Animal Model Workshop was hosted in partnership with the Kidney Cancer Program (KCP) at the University of Texas Southwestern (UTSW) Medical Center in Dallas, Texas on September 11-13, 2025.
The RCC Animal Model Workshop’s goals included clarifying the pros, cons, and best uses of animal models from different research labs. Initiating this kind of information sharing could help researchers interpret their results – and others’ – with more speed and accuracy.
“For the first time we have gathered an extraordinary concentration of expertise of the world’s leading minds in the development and applications of animal models for kidney cancer,” said Dr. Salvatore La Rosa, KCA’s Chief Scientific Officer. “At KCA, we have long recognized how critical accurate and reliable preclinical models are for advancing the field; this workshop grew out of that recognition. Together, we can share our progress, align on challenges, and chart new directions for cures on behalf of patients around the globe.”
What is an animal model?
Animal models are critical in helping us understand how bodies work and the basic mechanisms that fuel disease. Because they mimic the human body well, get many of the same diseases, and their genome is mapped and easy to change with precision, mice are used frequently to model cancer, including kidney cancer.
Animal models are used early in disease research and therapeutic development, which is why it’s referred to as preclinical research – well before a treatment or diagnostic test reaches a patient in their clinic.
“Animal models can illuminate the biology of disease and accelerate translation to clinic for both diagnostics and therapeutics,” said Dr. James Brugarolas, Director of the KCP and co-lead for the RCC Animal Model Workshop. “They create a surrogate, controlled environment for testing and developing novel therapies and diagnostics.”
A Survey of Preclinical RCC Research
Over the 3-day workshop, about 140 attendees learned about preclinical research happening at laboratories across the US and around the world.
Presenters discussed the questions they research in their own labs such as:
- What makes a “good” model and what are the challenges of creating one?
- Are there effective molecular targets for treating rare kidney cancers like chromophobe RCC and translocation RCC?
- What are the best ways of incorporating pathology of kidney cancer tissues in preclinical research?
Among the keynote speakers, two Nobel Laureates provided context for the current landscape of kidney cancer research.
Dr. William Kaelin of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Medicine for work on how cells respond to changes in oxygen – work that eventually led to the development of the anti-cancer drug belzutifan, which is now used to treat some kidney cancers – spoke about discovering treatment targets and choosing the best models in which to test them.
“All you have to do is look at the people in this room and you know we’re going to get there,” Kaelin said.
Dr. Bruce Beutler of UTSW, who received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Medicine for preclinical research discovering how our innate immunity is activated – a mechanism that is now integral in how cancer is treated – reviewed his work and how it relates to early-stage kidney cancer research today.
The workshop also included three breakout groups for focused discussion on modeling kidney cancer with advanced digital pathology tools, creating benchmarks for ensuring models will be clinically relevant, and best practices for RCC model development.
Accomplishments and Future Directions
A key accomplishment of this workshop was creating a unique environment for open discussion of preclinical research, setting the stage for new collaborations across laboratories and institutions that may not have otherwise had the opportunity to share their research goals and findings.
“I’ve learned a lot about new ways to target kidney cancer pathways, about drugs, about new systems in the laboratory and animal models and new exciting technology that is being applied to kidney cancer,” said one of the keynote speakers Dr. Marston Linehan, Chief of the Urologic Oncology Branch of the National Cancer Institute who pioneered the study of the genetic basis for kidney cancer. “There’s so many other great scientists from around the world… we’ve already developed some new collaborations with people working on kidney cancer so we’re very excited about that.”
“It’s been a successful meeting,” Brugarolas said. “We had the opportunity to reflect about several different types of preclinical models, their strengths and weaknesses, and what opportunities they offered to move the field forward.”
To continue collaboration and sharing knowledge, the KCA will create a dedicated resource for preclinical researchers to reference as they conduct their work or search for additional collaborators.
A Promising Future for Patients
One of the goals of the workshop was to set the stage for accelerating research from bench to bedside across the spectrum of kidney cancer. Several people shared what patients, families, and the kidney cancer community can be excited about.
The opportunity to spend two days talking about preclinical work that drives fundamental knowledge about disease and treatment, take clinical work to the lab bench to ask some important questions, and go back to the clinic and apply what we learn is very unique,” said workshop planning committee member and KCA board member Dr. Mahul Amin of LabCorp, USC Keck School of Medicine, and University of Tennessee Health Science Center. “This is behind-the-scenes work that is absolutely critical – to encourage and support this is key if you want to drive changes in kidney cancer care.
We’re having a session about the non-clear cell types of kidney cancer. This is an area where we need a lot of momentum and we have people from all over the world here who are working on these types,” said Dr. Lisa Henske, a clinician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital whose research focus is chromophobe RCC. “We can all think about how to make the best advances, fast track the best treatments, and move forward.
[The] passion – everybody here cares like crazy about what they’re doing,” said keynote speaker Dr. Richard Flavell, an immunobiologist at the Yale School of Medicine. “Then there are enormous successes. If you think about the immune system of cancer, we knew nothing and a [diagnosis] killed essentially everybody. The prognosis in kidney cancer has enormously improved with improvements in therapy and it’s incredible what’s been done, often as a result of meetings like this. It leaves me with tremendous optimism.
An animal model workshop is fundamentally important especially for the research of rare subtype kidney cancers because it directly addresses the unique challenges that [these] researchers face and it creates a collaborative framework to accelerate progress against these challenges,” said Kathy Liu, founder of Joey’s Wings Foundation supporting translocation RCC patients and research.
In his welcome to RCC Animal Model Workshop attendees, Dr. La Rosa highlighted how personal everyone’s research can be.
“This work is not only scientific it is profoundly human,” he said. “We hope this meeting is going to be the basis for new collaborations and pave the way for new models and new discoveries that will help fuel therapies for kidney cancer patients.”
Photos from the RCC Animal Model Workshop
