In this study, we propose to evaluate the potential of Raman spectroscopy (RS) to assess renal tumours at surgery. Different classes of Raman renal spectra acquired during a clinical protocol are discriminated using support vector machines classifiers. The influence on the classification scores of various preprocessing steps generally involved in RS are also investigated and evaluated in the particular context of renal tumour characterization. Encouraging results show the interest of RS to evaluate kidney cancer and suggest the potential of this technique as a surgical assistance during partial nephrectomy.