BARCELONA – Final overall survival (OS) did not differ significantly among patients with stage IV squamous non–small cell lung carcinoma who were treated with either first-line atezolizumab + chemotherapy or chemotherapy alone in the phase 3 IMpower131 trial.
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Dr. Federico Cappuzzo
Median OS in the intent-to-treat population was 14.2 months vs. 13.5 months with vs. without the programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) inhibitor atezolizumab, respectively (hazard ratio, 0.88), Federico Cappuzzo, MD, director of medical oncology at Azienda Unità Sanitaria Locale della Romagna-Ravenna, Italy, reported at the World Conference on Lung Cancer.
However, patients with high PD-L1 expression (14% and 13% of patients in the groups, respectively), experienced a clinically meaningful improvement in OS with atezolizumab + chemotherapy vs. chemotherapy alone (median of 23.4 vs. 10.2 months; HR, 0.48), Dr. Cappuzzo said at the conference, which was sponsored by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer.
“This means we had a reduction in the risk of death that was more than 50%,” he said, adding that no new or unexpected safety signals were reported.
IMpower131 randomized 1,021 patients with a median age of 65 years 1:1:1 to receive either atezolizumab (1,200 mg) + carboplatin (area under the curve 6) + paclitaxel (200 mg/m2) every 3 weeks, or atezolizumab + carboplatin + nab-paclitaxel (100 mg/m2 every week), or carboplatin + nab-paclitaxel for four or six cycles. Patients in the first two arms (A and B) received atezolizumab maintenance therapy until loss of clinical benefit or progressive disease occurred, and those in latter arm (C) received best supportive care after completing the treatment cycles.