Cemiplimab improves pain, quality of life in patients with advanced cSCC
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Patients treated with cemiplimab for advanced cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma had improvements to quality of life, pain and other symptoms, according to a presentation at South Beach Symposium Medical Dermatology Summit.
“Patients with advanced cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) who are not curable by surgery are generally administered palliative systemic therapy,” Michael R. Migden, MD, and colleagues wrote in the poster.
Migden and colleagues presented a post hoc analysis of a single-arm, open-label phase 2 clinical trial. They enrolled 193 patients (mean age, 71.1 years; men, 83.4%) with advanced cSCC with at least one lesion, Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status of 1 or less and a life expectancy longer than 12 weeks. Among these patients, 59 with metastatic cSCC and 78 with locally advanced cSCC received intravenous cemiplimab 2 mg/kg every 2 weeks for 12 treatment cycles and 56 with metastatic cSCC received 350 mg every 3 weeks for six treatment cycles. Researchers also analyzed opioid use at each treatment cycle.
Items on the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer 30-item questionnaire (QLQ-C30) related to global health status, functioning and symptoms were the primary outcomes of interest.
Patients overall saw mean increases to QLQ-C30 global health status vs. baseline (P < .001) and functional scales vs. baseline, including social function (P < .05) and emotional function (P < .05).
Patients also reported decreases in pain (P < .001). The researchers wrote that “opioid use decreased over study duration, suggesting that clinically meaningful improvement in pain was independent of opioid use.”
Other measures had decreases vs. baseline as well, including nausea or vomiting (P < .05), insomnia (P < .001), loss of appetite (P < .001) and constipation (P < .001).
“These results support cemiplimab as a standard of care option for treatment of advanced cSCC, with clinically meaningful benefits on [health-related quality of life] and clinically meaningful reductions in pain that appear to be independent of opioid use and may correlate with tumor response,” the researchers wrote.