The global landscape of drug development for kidney cancer

Renal cell cancer (RCC) is the third most diagnosed genitourinary malignancy in the world. Nearly a half of the diagnoses and 60% of related deaths occur in low-middle income countries (LMs), where prognosis is generally poor. We conducted a systematic research of ClinicalTrials.gov, searching RCC ongoing studies for adult patients. We included 205 trials in the final analysis. The enrolling centers were mainly distributed in high-income settings (88.9%). We estimated 94.6% of the trial population was enrolled in only five countries and none in LMs. Clinical drug development for RCC is driven by early phase studies, mainly assessing small molecule tyrosine kinase inhibitors and immunotherapy or the combination. Sixty percent of the trials were industry sponsored. Only a minority of the trials were in the early setting of care, adjuvant or neoadjuvant therapy. Disparities in drug development in LMs mirror a common underestimation of the value of research among the national priorities in cancer health planning, resulting in poor ethnic diversity and inclusiveness. This commonly results in incomplete knowledge of activity and safety of medicines across different ethnic groups, with consequences on priorities for cancer interventions and estimates of benefit in LMs patients. The use of RCC as a case study for inclusiveness suggests poor inclusion of non– Caucasian populations in the trials, especially trials testing new immunotherapy and targeted agents where RCC drug development is more pronounced, resulting in issues of generalizability in other ethnic groups when these compounds are approved with no ethnic restrictions or specifications.