Abstract: Renal cell carcinoma(RCC) is a common malignancy in adult males which has a high incidence and mortality rate. Immunotherapy is initially intended to activate the immune system to induce objective responses and disease stabilization. However, the high dose treatment has severe adverse effects which limit its clinical application. The development of targeted therapy turns out to be a novel approach for RCC therapy. Nevertheless, further investigations have demonstrated that single-agent therapy with either immune or targeted agents are difficult to achieve satisfied outcomes. Thus, future direction is to combine the use of immune and targeted drugs. This article briefly reviews the basic immunology research which allows readers to comprehensively compare and contrast different immunotherapy approaches on RCC.