Evaluation of circulating kidney injury marker-1 (KIM-1) as a prognostic and predictive biomarker in advanced renal cell carcinoma (aRCC): Post-hoc analysis of CheckMate 214.
Currently, we don't have any blood tests that can help someone to detect whether they have kidney cancer or not and whether kidney cancer is getting better or worse. In this study, we investigate a new blood test for kidney cancer called CIM1, and this is a blood test that can be taken at baseline and on treatment. We analyzed samples from over 800 patients from a large randomized trial called Checkmate 214. And we measured the blood levels of Kim1 in patients prior to treatment and after just 3 weeks of treatment. We found in this study that after 3 weeks of treatment, an increase versus a decrease in Kim1 helped us to predict how someone would do long term. And in fact, among patients who had an improvement in Kim1. The progression free survival was many, many times longer, 71 months versus 4 months, compared to patients who had an increase in this biomarker. And so we're hopeful that if we can validate this blood test, it will really give us a way to know ahead of time who is going to have a great response to immunotherapy and may not even need other treatment, and which patients might benefit from adding or intensifying their treatment in order to get a better response. We're looking at this biomark in other studies, and hopefully we'll be able to expand it to more and more patients.
