Kidney cancer usually gets caught during an unrelated medical procedure — picked up, say, during a CT scan after a case of appendicitis or a car accident. It’s uncommon in people younger than 50, and when it’s found early, the patient is generally in good shape. Surgery can be relatively simple. 

Usually. The five-year survival rate for patients with tumors that haven’t metastasized is about 70 percent, and the vast majority of the 64,000 or so annual cases in the U.S. can be treated through surgery without a need for an oncologist. But when the disease progresses, those numbers plummet. Stage 4 metastatic patients have a five-year survival rate of just 10 percent. It’s not a death sentence, but it’s close. 

As recently as 15 years ago, there was just one drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat stage 4 kidney cancer. Surgeons were only just learning how to remove tumors using robots. Radiation was rarely, if ever, used.

“This was a devastating disease. Most stage 4 patients died in a very short amount of time,” says Dr. Hans Hammers, Co-Leader of Clinical Research at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center’s Kidney Cancer Program. “It was a disease that drew the attention of researchers. Traditional chemotherapy, the mainstay treatment for other cancers, did not work. It was a challenge.” 

Hammers’ colleague, Dr. James Brugarolas, who leads the program, wanted to understand what caused kidney cancer. He wanted to figure out why there were so few drugs to treat it. He wondered — did stage 4 kidney cancer have to kill so many people? Years later, he would set out to do what few have been able to pull off: build a program where patients stand a chance.