 Hi, this is Laura Wood, and I'm a nurse at the Cleveland Clinic Tausset Cancer Institute, and this webinar is on understanding targeted therapies in kidney cancer. This short presentation is intended to give you and your loved ones some information on the treatments that we use for kidney cancer. Hygocentralukin II and interferon are immunotherapies used to treat metastatic kidney cancer. These drugs stimulate your immune system to destroy the cancer cells. Since 2005, seven targeted therapies have been approved for kidney cancer. These drugs target or inhibit pathways that are important to cancer cell growth and survival. These pathways are very complex highways within cells, and I'm hoping the next several cartoons will make this easier to understand. Think about your house. It's full of plumbing and electrical wires that make everything work. Your house is also full of furniture and appliances and other important things for your family. Tumors are like a house. They are full of pathways and cells that have specific functions for the cell to survive and grow. In order to turn the TV on, you need electrical power. For cancer cells to grow and spread, they also need power. In order to stop tumor cells from growing, we need to interfere or block the power supply. You can think of the antenna on the roof or the satellite dish as the receptor, and the electrical wires within the house is the pathway for signals from the receptor to the TV inside the cell. That's how power gets to your TV to turn it on. In the same fashion, that happens in tumor cells. Power or messages come through these highways or pathways that lead to the tumor cell being able to grow and spread or multiply. Bevacizumab or Avastin blocks the signal to the antenna, preventing power from getting from the receptor, the antenna, or the dish that's on your roof, preventing that power from getting inside the cell to turn the TV on. Turning the power pathway inside the tumor is another way to interfere with that power supply. Seraphonib or Nexivar, Sunitinib or Sutent, Pazoponib or Votrant, and Exitinib or Enlita are some of the drugs that are known as small molecule tyrosine kinase inhibitors. These drugs block the power pathway inside the cell, again preventing the TV from turning on or the cell from growing and multiplying. Temserolimus or Torusel and Everolimus or Affinitor inhibit the mTOR pathway, providing an additional approach to blocking the power needed for cancer cells to survive. This is a very simple example of how the drugs used to treat kidney cancer work. There are many more pathways involved in tumors and the blood vessels which surround the tumor. And continued research will help identify other pathways that are important in kidney cancer and will ideally lead to the additional drugs available to treat kidney cancer. Hopefully this has given you an easier way to understand the drugs that we currently have for treating kidney cancer. As we continue to expand our options for patients and develop new drugs that will again find new pathways to interfere or inhibit. Thank you very much.