FCS medical oncologist and hematologist Ernesto Bustinza-Linares, MD has co-authored an abstract published in the American Society of Clinical Oncology Journal, JCO Precision Oncology, that uncovers a new testing method to determine personalized care options for patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The abstract’s authors address the limitations of existing guidelines that recommend checkpoint immunotherapy, sometimes in combination with chemotherapy, for treating NSCLC, which often discounts patient variability and immune factors. The findings from the study show that by incorporating additional plasma proteome-based testing, combined with the standard protein inhibitor testing, clear differences in patient outcomes were observed after applying targeted treatments based on the testing results.
Current guidelines for the management of metastatic non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) without driver mutations recommend checkpoint immunotherapy with PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors, either alone or in combination with chemotherapy. This approach fails to account for individual patient variability and host immune factors and often results in less-than-ideal outcomes. To address the limitations of the current guidelines, we developed and subsequently blindly validated a machine learning algorithm using pretreatment plasma proteomic profiles for personalized treatment decisions.
We conducted a multicenter observational trial (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT04056247) of patients undergoing PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitor–based therapy (n = 540) and an additional patient cohort receiving chemotherapy (n = 85) who consented to pretreatment plasma and clinical data collection. Plasma proteome profiling was performed using SomaScan Assay v4.1.
Our test demonstrates a strong association between model output and clinical benefit (CB) from PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitor–based treatments, evidenced by high concordance between predicted and observed CB (R2 = 0.98, P < .001). The test categorizes patients as either PROphet-positive or PROphet-negative and further stratifies patient outcomes beyond PD-L1 expression levels. The test successfully differentiates between PROphet-negative patients exhibiting high tumor PD-L1 levels (≥50%) who have enhanced overall survival when treated with a combination of immunotherapy and chemotherapy compared with immunotherapy alone (hazard ratio [HR], 0.23 [95% CI, 0.1 to 0.51], P = .0003). By contrast, PROphet-positive patients show comparable outcomes when treated with immunotherapy alone or in combination with chemotherapy (HR, 0.78 [95% CI, 0.42 to 1.44], P = .424).
Plasma proteome–based testing of individual patients, in combination with standard PD-L1 testing, distinguishes patient subsets with distinct differences in outcomes from PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitor–based therapies. These data suggest that this approach can improve the precision of first-line treatment for metastatic NSCLC.
Another possible option for first line NSCLC EGFR mutated (non-exon 20) is Osimertinib (osi). Osi and chemotherapy had less brain metastases. And with Amivantamab and Lazertinib (EGFR inhibitor), the combination had better PFS and OS (HR0.8). Higher toxicity though with 10% discontinuation vs 3% for Osimertinib. This is interim analysis, toxicity was EGFR related mostly.
Osimertinib resulted in a significant progression-free survival benefit as compared with placebo: the median progression-free survival was 39.1 months with osimertinib versus 5.6 months with placebo in the EGFR mutated patients. Osmiertinib shows efficacy in patients with EGFR mutation who underwent curative surgery or chemoradiotherapy.
Perioperative nivolumab (Nivo) showed a 20% 18-month EFPS improvement. This is another option to consider for your patients with stage IIA-IIIB NSCLC. Of note, the study arm received chemo + Nivo x 4 cycles preoperatively, then 12 months of Nivo therapy, and toxicities were as expected.
This is another target for adjuvant therapy. The results are impressive. Notice that there was no chemotherapy in the study arm. Patients started on alectinib after surgery. Chemotherapy is losing ground to more tolerable treatments, more to follow, most likely, in the future.
Adding VEGF inhibitor to PD-1 blocker in addition to chemotherapy is better than a chemotherapy-alone regimen as a second-line therapy after TKI failure. This is true especially in patients with tumors with high PD-L1 expression, with not much besides chemotherapy as second-line therapy for those patients (or other clinical trials) that may be a better option that includes immunotherapy.
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