Dr. Bauml on the Use of Immunotherapy in Oligometastatic NSCLC

Joshua Bauml, MD, assistant professor, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, discusses the use of immunotherapy in the treatment of patients with oligometastatic non—small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania took patients with oligometastatic NSCLC and treated them with locally ablative therapy upfront followed by checkpoint inhibition to see if it would improve outcomes. Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) was given for 6 to 12 months in 45 patients, and their outcomes were compared with historical controls. Bauml says the addition of immunotherapy significantly improved median progression-free survival (PFS). Median PFS was approximately 19 months in the patients enrolled in the study compared with around 6.6 months in historical control data.

However, historical control data are heterogeneous and scant, so researchers also compared the data with ongoing studies of locally ablative therapy in this patient population. The ideal next steps would be to compare local ablation alone to local ablation with pembrolizumab, Bauml concludes.