A drug that increases the survival rates of patients with common lung cancer.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer associated deaths worldwide. Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) accounts for approximately 80-85% of all lung cancers. These are lung cancers that have comparable prognoses and respond to similar therapies. 

Treatments for advanced stages of NSCLC have improved in recent years. However, breakthroughs for early-stage forms of the ailment have only lately surfaced.

In a prior study, 73% of patients that got two doses of the immunotherapy medication nivolumab before surgery had no recurrences 18 months after their surgeries.

The patients in the prior nivolumab trial were recently followed up on for 5 years by the researchers. When compared to standard therapy, those who got nivolumab had a lower chance of recurrence after 5 years.

The results of the research were published in Clinical Cancer Research.

What did the researchers do?

The researchers recruited 21 patients with stage 1-3 NSCLC in the trial. The majority of the people recruited were female, and all the patients had an average age of 67.

Every two weeks, patients got two preoperative intravenous doses of nivolumab. They also had surgery four weeks after their first dosage.

Due to illness progression, one patient was ineligible for operation. The other patients were watched over for an average of 63 months.

After 5 years, 60% of patients had no recurrences, and 80% of the patients were still living, which is considerably higher than the typical 5-year survival rate of 36- 68%.

The researchers observed that nivolumab therapy was associated with few adverse effects but they did not cause surgical delays.

A senior author of the study and an associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Patrick Forde said this:

“To our knowledge, this is the longest follow-up to date for a PD-1/ PD-L1 inhibitor in the neoadjuvant setting- before surgery- for any solid tumor,”

How nivolumab works

Nivolumab is an anti-programmed-cell death protein-1 (PD-1) therapy. PD-1 therapy works by blocking PD-1 proteins on cancer cells, which then allows immune T cells to kill cancer cells more effectively. Think of it as a drug that removes the ‘cloak of invisibility’ of the cancer cells, so that T cells can ‘see’ them.

The researchers concluded that their findings suggest that treatment with nivolumab before surgery leads to better outcomes than standard treatment options.