Five-Year Survival With Nivolumab in Advanced Lung Cancer
Posted: Friday, June 30, 2017
Based on reportedly the longest follow-up data on patients treated with the immune checkpoint inhibitor nivolumab for advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the 5-year overall survival rate was 16%. Prior to immunotherapy, 5-year survival in this patient population was about 4%, revealed lead investigator Julie R. Brahmer, MD, of Johns Hopkins Sidney Simmel Comprehensive Cancer Center in Baltimore, at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR; Abstract CT077).
In the phase Ib, open-label, multicenter, dose-escalation study of nivolumab, 129 patients who had previously received up to 5 lines of systemic therapy took part. Participants were randomly assigned to 3 possible doses of nivolumab (1, 3, and 10 mg/kg once every 2 weeks) and followed for a minimum of 58 months. The data presented at the AACR meeting represent all three dosing cohorts.
In addition to the 5-year survival data, median overall survival was 9.9 months. Also, about 50% of patients had evaluable programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression, and 5-year survival rates appeared to increase with increasing levels of PD-L1 expression. Patients with PD-L1 levels less than 1% had a 5-year overall survival rate of 20%, compared with 43% in those who had PD-L1 levels greater than 50%.
