WCLC 2019: 5-Year Overall Survival With Nivolumab From CheckMate Trials
Posted: Thursday, September 12, 2019
Patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who were treated with nivolumab versus docetaxel experienced a fivefold increase in 5-year overall survival, pooled data from CheckMate 017 and CheckMate 057 have shown. No new safety signals were observed with nivolumab treatment. Researchers reported the latest results of these phase III trials at the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer 2019 World Conference on Lung Cancer (WCLC) in Barcelona (Abstract OA14.04).
At 5 years, reported Scott Gettinger, MD, of the Yale Comprehensive Cancer Center, New Haven, Connecticut, and colleagues, 13.4% of patients treated with the PD-1 inhibitor regimen were alive, versus 2.6% of those treated with chemotherapy. The cohorts originally included 854 patients with an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status of 0 or 1 who had experienced disease progression during or after first-line platinum-based chemotherapy; they were randomly assigned 1:1 to treatment with nivolumab or docetaxel. Patients could cross over to nivolumab from docetaxel after the primary analyses if they were no longer deriving benefit from the latter.
The 5-year survivors in both arms had baseline characteristics that did not differ from those of the original overall population and those of patients who survived less than 1 year, reported Dr. Gettinger and co-investigators, with some exceptions: Those patients who survived with nivolumab were more likely to have a performance status of 0 and PD-L1 expression more than 1%. The survivors who received docetaxel were more likely to have a performance status of 0, too, and to have started out with stage IIIB disease.
No new safety signals for nivolumab emerged as the patients remained on treatment longer, noted the team. Earlier results from the two trials formed the basis for nivolumab’s approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for patients with previously treated advanced NSCLC in 2015.
Disclosure: The study authors’ disclosure information may be found at wclc2019.iaslc.org.
