Renal cancer is a common malignant tumor in the urinary system. Current research has found that immune escape in kidney cancer can prevent immune system attacks through specific mechanisms, making it difficult for the immune system to effectively kill cancer cells, and promote the progression and metastasis of kidney cancer. Therefore, despite the continuous updating of immunotherapy methods for kidney cancer, the high recurrence rate, high drug resistance, and severe side effects of kidney cancer patients are still difficult to solve. This review systematically summarizes the latest mechanisms of immune escape in the renal cancer immune microenvironment, including abnormal expression of histocompatibility complex (MHC), secretion of immunosuppressive factors, programmed death ligand-1 with abnormal expression, recruiting immunosuppressive cells, and VHL gene deletion. This article also summarizes new treatment strategies proposed for these immune escape mechanisms. We hope this will help future researchers further explore the immune escape mechanism of renal cell carcinoma and propose new immunotherapy strategies.
Huang et al. (2026) studied this question.