Research

Dr. Ritesh Kotecha is a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He received a 2025 Pediatric Kidney Cancer Focus Award in partnership with Joey's Wings Foundation for his project "GPNMB-CAR T Cell Therapy for Translocation Renal Cell Carcinoma". He also received a KCA Research Award in 2020. We spoke with Dr. Kotecha about his work and what it…

Dr. Katherine Alexander is a researcher, Assistant Professor, and Cancer Center Member at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a biomedical research and education institution in New York. Dr. Alexander received a 2025 KCA Research Award for a project on "Nuclear Speckles as Prognostic and Predictive Indicators in ccRCC". We spoke with Dr. Alexander about her work and what it might mean…

Dr. Niki Zacharias Millward received a 2025 KCA Trailblazer Award for research on "Interrogating the Role of TRIP13 in Sarcomatoid Chromophobe Renal Cell Carcinoma". Dr. Millward previously received a KCA Research Award in 2023. Dr. Millward is an assistant professor in the Department of Urology – Research, Division of Surgery at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. We spoke…

Dr. Miguel Zugman received a 2025 KCA Trailblazer Award in partnership with Kure It Cancer Research for research on "Stool microbiome assessment in a randomized phase I trial of nivolumab and ipilimumab with or without EXL01 in the first-line treatment of metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC)". Dr. Zugman is a postdoctoral research fellow at City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center…

The Kidney Cancer Association (KCA) awarded over half a million dollars in research grants to six investigators pursuing high-impact kidney cancer research through the annual KCA Research Award Program and partnerships. Each award supports early- to mid-career investigators researching topics that require greater attention and understanding across the kidney cancer community. The KCA distributed a total of $525,000 in research…

The Kidney Cancer Association (KCA) and the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) partnered for a special joint session during the annual ASTRO meeting on September 30 in San Francisco, California. The session brought together an international, multidisciplinary panel of experts to discuss the emerging role of stereotactic ablative radiotherapy (SABR), a highly focused form of radiation therapy, to the…

We rounded up a few research highlights from the 2025 Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), held recently in Berlin, Germany. Is a triplet of drugs a superior first-line treatment strategy? Among four different combinations of first-line triplet therapy for advanced kidney cancer, all including pembrolizumab, one showed promising efficacy compared with the reference study arm in which patients…

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…

Cures don’t happen overnight. Research is slow. Step by step, each new discovery builds on all the discoveries that were made before. These might range from identifying a single, potentially cancer-causing genetic mutation to proving a new drug can target and kill cancer cells. Those really exciting research breakthroughs, the kinds that get written about in the news - like…

The end of May each year signals the beginning of summer and the ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago. The Kidney Cancer Association’s Clinical Advisory Board (CAB) members conducted reviews of the kidney cancer discussions at this year's meeting for the entire kidney cancer clinical team. Read on to learn more! Results Reporting final efficacy and safety data in the intent-to-treat…