ASCO24 Updates: Viktor Grünwald on CLEAR Study: Lenvatinib and Pembrolizumab for Kidney Cancer

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting is one of the largest and most prestigious conferences in the field of oncology. This year, the meeting took place from May 31 to June 4 in Chicago, Illinois. The event gathers oncologists, researchers, and healthcare professionals from around the world to discuss the latest advancements in cancer research, treatment, and patient care. Keynote sessions, research presentations, and panel discussions are typically part of the agenda, providing attendees with valuable insights into emerging trends and innovations in oncology.

This year, OncoDaily was at ASCO 2024 for the first time covering the meeting on-site. We had the pleasure of interviewing researchers who summarized the highlights of their work.

In this video, Viktor Grünwald, a medical oncologist at the University Hospital in Essen, shared insights on ‘Lenvatinib plus pembrolizumab (L+P) vs sunitinib (S) in advanced renal cell carcinoma (aRCC): Patterns of progression and subsequent therapy in the CLEAR trial.‘

Hello, my name is Viktor Grünwald and I’m a medical oncologist in the University Hospital in Essen, Germany. So at this meeting in ESCO 2024, what we did as a further analysis is really looking into subgroups of the CLEAR study, which investigated lenvetinib and pembrolizumab and compared it to sunitinib in first-line treatment of kidney cancer patients. So today we really focused on the patterns of progression.

That having said is, we looked into the organ sites where metastases were and we investigated the progression for these specific sites. So looking into time to progression by different organ sites such as brain, bone, lung, liver or lymph node for instance. And what we observed was really that the benefit of the combination of lenvetinib and pembrolizumab was maintained over sunitinib and that reconfirmed, I think, the usability or the position of lenvetinib and pembrolizumab as a first-line option in kidney cancer patients.

The second part of our analysis really focused on the benefit that a patient may have from the immune combination with lenvetinib and pembrolizumab. Because the treatment or the median progression for survival time is two years for that specific combination, but patients live 50 to 55 months in median. So how does it really end up contributing this short period of exposure to the overall survival time? And I think that for that purpose, we looked into how the tumor burden really behaved over time.

So starting off with the baseline tumor burden and how it has been at the time of progression. And what we found is really that for the combination, you do see a larger tumor shrinkage which is not a surprise. But at the time of progression, patients in the combination arm with lenvetinib and pembrolizumab had a decrease by 48 percent of their original tumor burden and it was higher than with sunitinib alone because for those patients the decrease was like 17 percent.

So I think these observations really indicate that patients that get off their therapy and go into second line with the combination seem to be in a better state. 

More videos and content from ASCO 2024 on OncoDaily.