Timothée Olivier: How many patients with advanced or metastatic cancer respond to immunotherapy
Timothée Olivier, Medical oncologist at the Oncology Division of Geneva University, shared his recent article on X:
How many patients with advanced or metastatic cancer respond to immunotherapy (checkpoint inhibitors)?
Our new paper in the International Journal of Cancer tackles this question, led by Alyson Haslam with Vinay Prasad.
First, check Table 1: the number of immunotherapy compounds—anti-PD-1, anti-PD-L1, anti-CTLA-4, anti-LAG-3…
A lot of ‘me-too’ drugs in this space.
Now, the main research question:
How many US patients are eligible for (may receive immunotherapy), and how many will respond (tumor shrinkage)
In 2023:
- Eligibility: 56%
- Response: 20%
Next, let’s look at how this has evolved over time.
Notice how the eligibility and response rates have reached a plateau, indicating that most patients who are benefitting from immunotherapy are now identified since years.
However, the blue curve shows that the number of FDA approvals continues to skyrocket!
In our analysis, we also looked at long-term benefit.
Only 16 approvals had ≥10% of pts followed-up at 3 years, and just 2 approvals at 5 years. Among those, the median progression-free rates were 18.9% (3y) and 25.5% (5y). Melanoma showed the strongest long-term benefit.
Here is the breakdown of responses according to tumor types and indications, over time.
This work provides a big-picture view of the immunotherapy landscape – compounds that have been truly transformative for a fraction of patients. However, 80% do not respond to them, and 43% aren’t eligible.
See the “Drugdevletter” coverage by Alyson Haslam and subscribe for more content :
Link to full article
Thanks for following + more works, VK Prasad Lab!
Authors: Alyson Haslam, Timothée Olivier and Vinay Prasad
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