Current research in kidney cancer risk and prognosis:: towards a transdisciplinary approach

Kidney cancer is diagnosed in more than 330,000 people each year worldwide, and accounts for 2.4% of all adult cancers and over 140,000 deaths annually. Incidence rates have been increasing sharply with unexplained variation in different countries and ethnicities. Epidemiological studies have identified several lifestyle and host risk factors, among which only tobacco use, hypertension, and obesity achieve consensus. Although research programs on kidney cancer have remained sparse and lacked transdisciplinary data integration, new knowledge has recently emerged from large traditional epidemiological studies as well as consortium efforts involving high-throughput technologies, such as massive parallel DNA sequencing. I will provide an overview of the field and develop examples of the most recent findings.

Speaker: Ghislaine Scello, International Agency for Research on Cancer