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4 slides generated from the cancer page, with a quiz from the open benchmark and speaker notes that cite the sources. Arrow keys move between slides; Print gives one slide per page.
Mucinous tubular and spindle cell carcinoma is a rare, usually slow-growing kidney cancer, commoner in women, whose cells form small tubes and spindles in a mucus-rich background. It is driven by loss of the Hippo growth-control pathway rather than the faults of common kidney cancer, and surgery cures most cases.
Mucinous tubular and spindle cell carcinoma is a renal cell carcinoma type recognised since 2004 and kept in the 2022 WHO classification, with tightly packed tubules merging into spindle cells in a mucinous stroma, a female predominance and generally indolent behaviour (Moch 2022). Whole-exome and transcriptome sequencing of 22 tumours found biallelic loss or alteration of Hippo pathway tumour suppressors in 85 percent, PTPN14 (31 percent) and NF2 (22 percent) most often, with SAV1 and HIPK2 in a mutually exclusive pattern, recurrent chromosomal losses, and increased nuclear YAP1 in 90 percent (Cancer Discovery 2016). VSTM2A and IRX5 were then identified as lineage-specific markers, with all 33 tumours showing moderate to high VSTM2A expression by RNA in situ hybridisation against low or absent expression in papillary, clear cell and chromophobe carcinomas (Am J Surg Pathol 2018).
How it differs from its parent: it lacks VHL loss and the papillary trisomies, its main differential is papillary renal cell carcinoma (from which VSTM2A separates it), and it is indolent in the typical form while high-grade and sarcomatoid variants can metastasise.
| Setting | Approach | Guideline |
|---|---|---|
| All stages | Partial or radical nephrectomy; advanced disease on the renal cell carcinoma page without a dedicated standard. | not mapped |