Evaluation of the Role of DW-MRI in the Assessment of Tumor Response to Sunitinib in Metastatic Renal Cell Carcinoma.

Nishat Bharwani¹, Marc E. Miquel², Thomas Powles³, Redha Boubertakh², Anju Sahdev¹, Rodney H. Reznek¹, Andrea G. Rockall¹

In recent years there has been a shift in the treatment options available for metastatic renal cell carcinoma (RCC). There is a clinical need for early identification of subsets of patients who will respond to these new targeted therapies. To our knowledge, our work with sequential diffusion weighted MRI (DW-MRI) is the first to demonstrate that dynamic changes occur with sunitinib therapy. Correlation of these changes with overall survival is required to establish their prognostic significance. This work may therefore lead to the first steps towards individualized therapy in metastatic RCC.