Peter Humphrey, MD, PhD, Discusses Current Role of Pathology in RCC

CancerNetwork® spoke with Peter Humphrey, MD, PhD, professor of pathology and director of Genitourinary Pathology at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conneticut , about how community physicians treating patients with kidney cancer can best use pathology to help select therapy. Humphrey spoke about this topic at the 15th Annual Interdisciplinary Prostate Cancer Congress® and Other Genitourinary Malignancies, hosted by Physicians’ Education Resource®, LLC (PER®).

Transcript:

Things have changed, and now needle biopsies are being performed more often. A number of years ago, there used to be mostly nephrectomy cases and [they were] usually radical nephrectomies. Now, things have shifted a bit and we see many partial nephrectomies for kidney cancer, as well as needle biopsies for patients who are being considered for active surveillance, cryoablation, or local therapy. The type of tissue that we receive has changed. There are limitations for each, particularly for needle biopsies where classification and grading are good, but there are certain categories where there can be some challenges, especially with oncocytic renal neoplasms. That limitation is important to know. It’s good to know what the differential diagnosis might be when we’re confronted with this subset of renal cell neoplasms, like oncocytic tumors that might give us difficulty.