The Case for Chemoimmunotherapy for Patients With PD-L1-High Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer in the First-Line Setting
At the Great Debates & Updates in Lung Cancer meeting in New York, New York, Patrick Forde, MD, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, debated in favor of chemoimmunotherapy, vs immunotherapy alone, in the first-line setting for patients with high PD-L1 expression and non-small cell lung cancer.
Transcript:
Hello, I'm Dr Patrick Forde, I'm a Medical Oncologist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Today at the Great Debates & Updates in Lung Cancer 2023, I was looking at 2 areas: First of all, looking at PD-L1-high advanced non-small cell lung cancer and I was arguing favor of the use of chemoimmunotherapy as first-line therapy for patients with PD-L1-high lung cancer.
Some of the arguments in favor of this, I think, is that we have very mature data, 5-year follow-up, suggesting that more than 20% of patients with PD-L1 high lung cancer will be alive after initial chemo-immunotherapy. Secondly, some patients will not respond to PD-1 monotherapy in the first-line setting, and we do see some crossover in the overall survival and [progression-free survival] PFS curves in those first few months when patients are treated with, for example, pembrolizumab monotherapy or cemiplimab monotherapy.
These are key points to keep in mind, and that's why we should have equipoise at the very least, in considering either chemo-immunotherapy or single-agent immunotherapy for this group of patients.
Source:
Forde P. Debate: Debate: How to Handle PD-L1 >50% - Chemo + IO. Presented at Great Debates & Updates in Lung Cancer; September 21-23; New York, NY.
