After surgery, your doctor will give you some advice about tumor recurrence and metastasis. Even in very early stage kidney cancer, the possibility of tumor recurrence cannot be ruled out. Usually, preventive treatment to reduce the chance of recurrence after radical surgery can be called adjuvant therapy. The doctor will assess each patient’s risk of recurrence after surgery, and if the risk of recurrence is high, adjuvant therapy may be needed.
There is no standard postoperative adjuvant therapy regimen that can be recommended for limited renal cancer. In a subset of patients, postoperative interferon-alpha or interleukin-2 may help to reduce the rate of recurrence and metastasis after surgery.
A large retrospective study abroad showed that, overall, postoperative treatment with adjuvant anti-angiogenesis inhibitors (sunitinib or sorafenib) for kidney cancer did not significantly improve patient survival compared with placebo and increased the incidence of some adverse events. However, more studies are needed in the future to identify certain patients who may benefit from targeted therapy.
Another international multicenter clinical trial of Girentuximab, a monoclonal antibody targeting the kidney cancer protein G250, showed no clinical benefit from adjuvant therapy with Girentuximab in patients with renal clear cell carcinoma either.