Patients with Lung Cancers Respond to Immunotherapy - Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center

Baltimore, April 3rd, 2017 - 5-year follow-up survival rates after immunotherapy with the drug nivolumab were presented on April 3rd at the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2017 (abstract #CT077). 

The data, collected in November 2016, was gleaned from a trial that involved 129 non-small cell lung cancer patients from 11 hospitals nationwide, including the Johns Hopkins Hospital. It showed a five-year survival estimate of 16 percent, compared with a 1 to 4 percent in that sub-group of the general population. 

Patients had taken the drug intravenously once every two weeks for up to 96 weeks. The Journal of Clinical Oncology first reported the results in 2015, and that year the drug was approved by the FDA. Of the 129 patients included, 16 patients survived nearly five years, twelve of which discontinued all therapy and showed no evidence of worsening disease and the remaining four received further chemotherapy or joined other trials. 

"It's clear that the patients who beat the survival odds are in some ways truly unique biologically, and the goal now is to discover exactly how immunotherapy is keeping their disease in check,"  says Julie Brahmer, M.D., program leader at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and director of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center on the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center campus. 
Defining which patients need continued therapy and which don't not only would get the best treatments to each patient more quickly, but also present an opportunity for cost savings for patients who won't benefit from the expensive drug, which can cost more than $100,000 per year.

Brahmer cautions that the study's value is limited by the fact that patients who received nivolumab were not directly compared with patients who did not receive the drug.

—Jocelyn Planche