The role of systemic chemotherapy in the treatment of kidney cancer.

Traditional cytotoxic chemotherapy has been considered to be ineffective in renal cell carcinoma, likely due to multiple mechanisms of high-level drug resistance proteins such as p-glycoprotein expressed by these cancers. Nonetheless, low level activity of several nucleoside analogues and the elucidation of critical molecular pathways and targets in this disease, such as the angiogenic pathway, provide hope that important advances can and will be made.