Dr. Langer on the Impact of the PACIFIC Trial on Stage III NSCLC

Corey J. Langer, MD, director, Thoracic Oncology, Abramson Cancer Center, professor of medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, discusses the impact of the PACIFIC trial results on the treatment landscape of stage III non—small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

The phase III PACIFIC study evaluated the role of durvalumab (Imfinzi) following standard chemoradiation versus placebo in patients with stage III NSCLC. Median progression-free survival for the durvalumab arm was 16.8 months compared with 5.6 months in the placebo arm. Although some are skeptical about the lack of overall survival (OS) data, AstraZeneca announced that the OS data were positive for the study in May 2018.

Langer says that for patients with stage III NSCLC, the standard of care is durvalumab after chemoradiation. This is in contrast to immunotherapy approaches like vaccines and other agents that have failed. Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) has been looked at in the same setting, and Langer says that these data looked just as good—if not better—than the durvalumab data. There is a lot of work to look forward to with immunotherapy in locally advanced NSCLC, he concludes.