AstraZeneca said on Tuesday its cancer drug, Imfinzi, combined with Amgen’s targeted immunotherapy, Imdelltra, significantly improved overall survival of extensive-stage small-cell lung cancer patients in a late-stage trial.
The trial included patients with extensive-stage small cell lung cancer who had not progressed following standard induction treatment with Imfinzi in combination with platinum chemotherapy and etoposide.
Imfinzi is approved in the US, EU, Japan, China and many other countries around the world as the standard-of-care treatment for ES-SCLC and limited-stage SCLC (LS-SCLC) based on the CASPIAN and ADRIATIC Phase III trials, respectively.
Susan Galbraith, Executive Vice President, Oncology Haematology R&D, AstraZeneca, said: “These results show that Imfinzi-based induction therapy followed by maintenance treatment with Imfinzi plus tarlatamab demonstrates an unprecedented improvement in overall survival for patients with this highly aggressive form of lung cancer. Imfinzi continues to reshape how lung cancer is treated, establishing new standards of care across multiple settings, and these new findings further underscore its role as the backbone immunotherapy of choice for small cell lung cancer.”
Jacob Sands, MD, Associate Chief of the Lowe Center for Thoracic Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, said: “Given the aggressive nature of small cell lung cancer, many patients quickly relapse on current therapy and never reach second-line treatment. These patients do not have time to wait, making substantial progress in the first-line setting critically important. In my career treating people with extensive-stage small cell lung cancer, these are among the most compelling survival results I have seen, indicating the potential to reshape the natural history of small cell lung cancer. DeLLphi-305 represents an unprecedented milestone and suggests we may be entering a new era where meaningfully longer survival is possible for more patients.”
Overall, the safety and tolerability profile of Imfinzi plus tarlatamab was consistent with the known safety profiles of the individual treatments, with no new safety signals identified.
About Small cell lung cancer
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death globally, accounting for almost one in five (19%) cancer deaths.4,5 Lung cancer is broadly split into non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and SCLC, with about 15% classified as SCLC.6 About two-thirds of SCLC patients are diagnosed with ES-SCLC, in which the cancer has spread widely through the lung or to other parts of the body.
While survival rates have improved in recent years following the introduction of immune checkpoint inhibitors, prognosis is still poor, with only 18.1% of LS-SCLC patients and 3.6% of ES-SCLC patients alive five years after diagnosis.2
