Cabozantinib in the treatment of patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma

In recent years, the standards of drug therapy for advanced kidney cancer have undergone significant changes associated with the appearance of the effective immune checkpoint inhibitors, as well as the high affinity second-generation multi-kinase inhibitors. One of the new tyrosine kinase inhibitors associated with the proven antitumor activity and safety in patients with advanced forms of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is cabozantinib. The standards of drug therapy for advanced renal cancer have significantly changed in recent years with the emergence of effective anti-tumor immune response checkpoint inhibitors and high-affinity second-generation multikinase inhibitors. One of the novel tyrosine kinase inhibitors with proven antitumor activity and safety in patients with advanced renal cell cancer (RCC) is cabozantinib. In the first-line therapy for advanced renal cancer, the combination of cabozantinib with nivolumab became the regimen of choice in patients of all risk groups, according to International Metastatic RCC Database Consortium (IMDC), regardless of the presence of a sarcomatoid component in the tumor based on the results of the randomized phase III CheckMate 9ER clinical trial (n=651), which demonstrated a significant benefit of immune targeted therapy compared to sunitinib in terms of overall survival (OS; median 37.7 and 34.3 months, respectively), progression-free survival (PFS; median 16.6 and 8.3 months, respectively) and objective response rate (ORR; 55.7 and 28.4%, respectively). Cabozantinib monotherapy in the first-line therapy of advanced renal cancer in patients in the intermediate-risk and poor-risk groups is an alternative regimen reserved for patients with contraindications to anti-tumor immune response checkpoint inhibitors. This recommendation is based on the results of the open-label phase II RCT, CABOSUN (n=157), which showed a significant increase in PFS in the cabozantinib group compared to sunitinib (8.6 month vs 5.3 months, respectively). Also, cabozantinib is the drug of choice in papillary RCC due to the proven advantage in terms of PFS over sunitinib (9.0 and 5.6 months, respectively) demonstrated in the SWOG 1500 phase II RCT (n=152). Cabozantinib remains the drug of choice for second-line therapy of RCC resistant to anti-angiogenic therapy, based on the results of the phase III METEOR RCT, in which the drug showed a compelling advantage over everolimus for PFS (7.4 and 3.8 months, respectively) and OS (21.4 and 16.5 months, respectively). The article presents a detailed analysis of these studies.