Key Statistics

Global incidence: An estimated 400,000 new cases and 175,000 deaths worldwide in 2024.

U.S. incidence: About 80,450 new cases of kidney cancer (50,770 in men and 29,680 in women) will be diagnosed in 2026.

Risk: The lifetime risk for developing kidney cancer in men is about 1 in 45. The lifetime risk for women is about 1 in 75.

Immunology and Kidney Cancer

When kidney cancer starts in the tubules of the kidney that filter blood, it is called renal cell carcinoma (RCC), There are many subtypes of RCC. The most common is clear-cell RCC, which is considered a highly immunogenic tumor. This means clear-cell RCC is visible to the immune system and can induce an adaptive immune response or the part of the immune system that recognizes, eliminates, and remembers threats, like cancer cells or germs. However, every tumor lives in a complex neighborhood of cells, structures, and signals known as the tumor microenvironment (TME). Cancer can use the TME to avoid immune attack and promote its own survival.  

The good news is that because RCC is immunogenic, there has been success in treating RCC with immunotherapy. Immunotherapy is a group of drugs that empowers the immune system to fight cancer more effectively. Kidney cancer was one of the first cancers to be treated with immunotherapy in 1992.  

Today, most immunotherapies for kidney cancer are checkpoint inhibitors. These medications remove the “brakes” from cancer-fighting immune cells called T cells to allow these cells to fight cancer. For many kidney cancer patients, checkpoint inhibitors are used in combination with targeted therapies. Targeted therapies interfere with specific molecules involved in cancer cell growth and survival. Unlike immunotherapy, targeted treatments directly block the pathways tumors rely on to grow and spread. 

What’s next for kidney cancer?

In 2025, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, developed a new immunotherapy for metastatic kidney cancer that uses specially made immune cells to attack tumors. This treatment does not need to be customized to each individual patient, making it an “off-the-shelf” approach that could help more people and reduce complications. Metastatic kidney cancer occurs when the cancer has spread beyond the kidney. It is an aggressive cancer that rarely responds to currently available immunotherapies, so this research is promising for these patients.  

Papillary RCC is a less common type of kidney cancer that is thought to begin in a different cell than clear-cell RCC. Recent studies have shown that papillary RCC may be linked to changes in a gene called MET. Researchers are working to better understand papillary RCC and improve treatment for this less common kidney cancer.