News

Kidney cancer patients have 'prospect of longer life' after UCC research breakthrough

20 Jan 2021

Prof. Thomas Walther's group publishes exciting collaborative paper in Science Translational Medicine:

New research at UCC and Harvard University has found a treatment that could potentially extend the lives of kidney cancer patients. Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is the sixth most frequently diagnosed cancer in men and the 10th in women, accounting for over 175,000 deaths annually worldwide. The five-year survival rate for patients with metastatic RCC is only about 12%. Resistance to therapy occurs in most patients, and new combinations of treatments to enhance the efficacy of current medication are urgently needed. A team of investigators led by Dr Thomas Walther, Professor in Pharmacology at UCC, and Dr Rupal Bhatt, Associate Professor, Medicine, at Harvard Medical School, have identified that the enzyme ACE2 plays an essential role in resisting current therapies. Dr Walther of UCC said: “If you have been diagnosed with kidney cancer the prospect of longer life could be now possible, but it requires immediate translation into clinical trials to test the new treatment regimen.” Elaborating on the further implications this research has on other cancers, Dr Walther says: “Furthermore, since resistance to VEGF-pathway inhibitors is a general problem in cancer treatment, our findings have broader implications for VEGF-pathway inhibitor therapies that beyond RCC could be extended to other types of cancers.” This new research has been published in Science Translational Medicine.

Weblink to media coverage of article in The Irish Examiner (20th of January, 2021)

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