Is the Efficacy of Adding Ramucirumab to Docetaxel Related to a History of Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors in the Real-World Clinical Practice?

Abstract

Reports on the efficacy of second-line treatment with cytotoxic agents after treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitors are limited. Here, we retrospectively evaluated patients in the real-world clinical practice treated with docetaxel or docetaxel plus ramucirumab. Ninety-three patients treated with docetaxel or docetaxel plus ramucirumab as a second- or later-line therapy were included. The patients were categorized into the following four treatment groups: docetaxel group (n = 50), docetaxel/ramucirumab group (n = 43) and pretreated (n = 45) and untreated (n = 48) with immune checkpoint inhibitor groups. The docetaxel/ramucirumab group showed an overall response rate of 57.1% in patients pretreated with immune checkpoint inhibitors and 20% in untreated patients. The docetaxel group showed an overall response rate of 15.4% in patients pretreated with immune checkpoint inhibitors and 5.0% in untreated patients. The median time-to-treatment failure and the median survival time were longer in the docetaxel/ramucirumab group than in the docetaxel group in both immune checkpoint inhibitor-pretreated and -untreated groups. There was no difference in time-to-treatment failure and overall survival between immune checkpoint inhibitor-pretreated and -untreated groups in each docetaxel and docetaxel/ramucirumab treatment group. In conclusion, our real-world data show that the addition of ramucirumab to docetaxel was superior to docetaxel monotherapy for improving time-to-treatment failure and overall survival, irrespective of previous treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitors.

Keywords

• non-small cell lung cancer
• immune checkpoint inhibitor
• ramucirumab
• docetaxel
• vascular endothelial growth factor