Chemoimmunotherapy may help patients with small cell lung cancer, poorer performance status
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Chemoimmunotherapy extended PFS compared with chemotherapy for patients with extensive-stage small cell lung cancer and ECOG performance status of 2 or 3, according to retrospective study results.
The difference in OS did not reach statistical significance; however, that may have been due to the small study cohort and subsequent lack of power of the study, researchers concluded.
“Clinicians should consider chemoimmunotherapy for these patients,” Muskan Agarwal, MD, of the department of internal medicine at Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, and colleagues wrote. “Further research with a larger study size is needed to evaluate the potential benefit of chemoimmunotherapy on [OS].”
Prior studies showed chemoimmunotherapy improved outcomes compared with chemotherapy for patients with extensive-stage small cell lung cancer and ECOG performance status of 0 or 1. However, those studies excluded patients with ECOG performance status of 2 or 3, so evidence is limited about the benefit of chemoimmunotherapy for this subgroup, according to study background.
Agarwal and colleagues reviewed outcomes of 46 adults with extensive-stage small cell lung cancer and ECOG performance status of 2 or 3 treated at Mayo Clinic between 2017 and 2020.
Twenty-six patients received platinum-etoposide and atezolizumab (Tecentriq, Genentech), an anti-PD-1 antibody. The other 20 patients received platinum-etoposide alone.
Results showed a modest but statistically significant PFS improvement in the chemoimmunotherapy group (4.1 months vs. 3.2 months; P = .0491).
Researchers also reported numerically longer median OS with chemoimmunotherapy, but the difference did not reach statistical significance (9.3 months vs. 7.6 months).
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