Angelica Welch // Published Mon July 2, 2018
Anne Chiang, MD, PhD.
Immunotherapy may provide an opportunity to change the treatment paradigm of small cell lung cancer (SCLC) as new clinical trials report out in the next year, says Anne Chiang, MD, PhD. Recent results with immunotherapy agents in the second-line setting have already influenced guidelines.
The FDA granted a priority review designation to a supplemental biologics license application for nivolumab (Opdivo) in April 2018, based on findings from the phase I/II CheckMate-032 trial in patients with SCLC with disease progression following 2 or more lines of therapy.
The combination of nivolumab and ipilimumab (Yervoy) has shown impressive results in SCLC with a high tumor mutational burden (TMB), said Chiang. In an exploratory analysis from CheckMate-032, this combination induced an objective response rate (ORR) of 46% in patients with recurrent SCLC with high TMB. This was compared with an ORR of 21% with nivolumab monotherapy.
Additionally, data with pembrolizumab (Keytruda), atezolizumab (Tecentriq), and durvalumab (Imfinzi) are expected to read out within the next few years.
Aside from immunotherapy, Chiang says that PARP inhibitors and lurbinectedin all may have a place in this landscape in the future, either as monotherapy or in combination.
In an interview with Targeted Oncology, Chiang, a professor and thoracic oncologist at Yale Cancer Center, discussed recent developments with immunotherapy and the overall outlook for the treatment landscape of SCLC.
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