Real-World Implications of the IMpower133 Trial in ES-SCLC

In an interview with Targeted Oncology™, Eric S. Nadler, MD, the medical director of US Oncology Health Informatics and Internet Technology and an oncologist at Texas Oncology, discusses the real-world patient characteristics and treatment duration of the immunotherapy combination treatment of the IMpower133 trial (NCT02763579) in patients with extensive-stage small cell lung cancer (ES-SCLC).

The randomized, phase I/III, multicenter, double-blinded, placebo-controlled IMpower133 trial examined a total of 408 patients with ES-SCLC between October 1, 2018, and December 31, 2019. Patients were then followed up through March 31, 2020, in order to evaluate the safety and efficacy of atezolizumab (Tecentriq) in combination with carboplatin plus etoposide (CE) vs placebo plus CE in chemotherapy-naive patients.

Findings showed the real-word treatment duration data to be similar to results of the IMpower133 study and the real-world implications that immunotherapy has had on the ES-SCLC space. While the results were not a surprise, according to Nadler, they have helped establish the usefulness of immunotherapy in this patient population.

Transcription:

0:08 | I don't think there is anything shocking or surprising. It showed 2 things at the end of the day. It showed that it was readily adopted almost immediately, the majority of patients were getting chemoimmunotherapy immediately from the publication and presentation of this data and its adoption. Some people think that it takes 18 months, sometimes even longer than that to funnel innovation to community physicians, but this actually shows that almost immediately, or at least the comfort of using immunotherapy in other diseases and in lung cancer must have been in embedded in the network, because as soon as it was FDA approved, it was adopted almost entirely throughout the network in a very short period of time.

Then the second thing is, I would imagine that the data that was presented would echo real world findings. I didn't think that patients being a little bit old or those who had brain metastases, or a little worse projected survival would not be able to tolerate the addition of immunotherapy to it. The fact that it echoed the data we saw in [Impower133] was not actually a surprising finding. I would have expected that. It was just nice that both of those things bore out.