Pembrolizumab Plus NK-Cell Therapy for Advanced Lung Cancer
Posted: Wednesday, April 1, 2020
According to results published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, patients with non–small cell lung cancer had better outcomes when treated with pembrolizumab plus human natural killer (NK) cells than with pembrolizumab alone. Mao Lin, MD, of Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China, and colleagues suggest further studies with larger sample sizes are warranted to confirm their findings.
“This exciting phenomenon confirmed that pembrolizumab plus NK cells exhibited an enhanced effect in vivo, suggesting that PD-1/PD-L1 blockade elicits an antitumor response by NK cells,” the researchers concluded.
Between July 2016 and November 2017, a total of 379 patients were screened for study enrollment, and 249 of them (65.7%) were assessed for PD-L1 expression. Then, 109 patients with a PD-L1 tumor proportion score of ≥ 1% were randomly assigned to two treatment groups: group A received pembrolizumab plus NK cells (n = 55), and group B received pembrolizumab alone (n = 54). They received intravenous pembrolizumab (10 mg/kg) once every 3 weeks and did not stop treatment until they experienced tumor progression or intolerable toxicity. Group A was given two cycles of NK-cell therapy.
Group A had better survival rates than group B. The median overall survival was 15.5 months for group A and 13.3 months for group B. The median progression-free survival was 6.5 months for group A and 4.3 months for group B (P < .05). Of the patients in group A with a TPS ≥ 50%, the median overall and progression-free survival outcomes were “significantly prolonged.” Furthermore, patients in group A who received multiple courses of NK-cell infusion had better overall survival than those who received one course of NK-cell infusion (18.5 vs. 13.5 months).
Disclosure: The study authors reported no conflicts of interest.
