Chemotherapy in metastatic renal cell cancer

Currently, there is no standard treatment for patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC) who do not respond to or progress after transient remission to first-line immunotherapy. At the end of the 1990s, no single chemotherapeutic drug, alone or in combination with interleukin-2 (IL-2) or interferon-alfa (IFN), had shown activity beyond the one expected by immunotherapy alone. New drugs on the market such as the pyrimidine analog gemcitabine or taxane-based chemotherapeutics may show promising tumor activity in combination with targeted therapy, but this has to be substantiated in upcoming trials. There is a great need to develop effective systemic therapy for advanced MRCC and to evaluate the efficacy of new drugs in clinical trials.