Lung Cancer Durvalumab

Durvalumab Boots PFS Even in Stage 3 Lung Cancer

Liam Davenport
September 09, 2017

MADRID, Spain — Immunotherapy could be the new standard of care in patients with stage III, locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who have failed chemoradiotherapy, after a trial showed that the anti-programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1) inhibitor durvalumab (Imfinzi, AstraZeneca) is effective in this hard-to-treat population.
Up to 35% of patients with NSCLC present with stage III, locally advanced disease that is, in the majority of cases, unresectable.
At present, the standard of care in this group is platinum-based doublet chemotherapy and concurrent radiotherapy, yielding a median progression-free survival (PFS) of 8 to 10 months, with only 15% of patients alive at 5 years.
The new results, from the PACIFIC study, showed that giving durvalumab after chemoradiotherapy doubled PFS over placebo, increasing it by 11 months.

Moreover, just less than half of durvalumab-treated patients were still alive 18 months after starting treatment.
This is the first randomized controlled trial of an immunotherapy in this clinical setting, noted lead author Luis Paz-Ares, MD, PhD, Medical Oncology, Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre, CiberOnc, Universidad Complutense and CNIO, Madrid, Spain.
The study was presented during a Presidential Symposium at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2017 Congress, and simultaneously published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In an ESMO press release, Dr Paz-Ares said that the improvement in PFS "was consistent across all patient subgroups that were analysed," and that the toxicity increase seen in the durvalumab group was "slight."