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谦和的菠萝
1 年前 |
Department of Pharmacy, The Affiliated Cancer Hospital of Xiangya School of Medicine, Central South University, Changsha, China
Department of PET-CT Center, Chenzhou NO. 1 People’s Hospital, Chenzhou, China
Department of Pharmacy, The Affiliated Cancer Hospital of Xiangya School of Medicine, Central South University, Changsha, China
Lung Cancer and Gastrointestinal Unit, Department of Medical Oncology, The Affiliated Cancer Hospital of Xiangya School of Medicine, Central South University, Changsha, China
Department of Pharmacy, The Affiliated Cancer Hospital of Xiangya School of Medicine, Central South University, Changsha, China
Department of Pharmacy, The Affiliated Cancer Hospital of Xiangya School of Medicine, Central South University, Changsha, China
Lung Cancer and Gastrointestinal Unit, Department of Medical Oncology, The Affiliated Cancer Hospital of Xiangya School of Medicine, Central South University, Changsha, China Department of Pharmacy, The Affiliated Cancer Hospital of Xiangya School of Medicine, Central South University, Changsha, China Department of PET-CT Center, Chenzhou NO. 1 People’s Hospital, Chenzhou, China Lung Cancer and Gastrointestinal Unit, Department of Medical Oncology, The Affiliated Cancer Hospital of Xiangya School of Medicine, Central South University, Changsha, China
Xiaoqiang Yue , Shanghai Changzheng Hospital, China
Pre-clinical studies have shown that the intrinsic PD-L1 expression was upregulated in EGFR-sensitive mutation NSCLC cells, which induces the apoptosis of T cells and facilitates the immune escape. In addition, MHCI and class II molecules were enhanced after exposure to EGFR-TKIs, which will always be accompanied by the induction of IFN-γ and T-cell–mediated tumor killing. For progressive patients who have been pretreated with TKIs, sequential treatment with ICIs was widely reported ( Yang et al., 2019 ). KEYNOTE-001, a phase I trial, indicated that pembrolizumab was not suitable for EGFR-positive mutation patients who have been pretreated with TKIs (median OS 4 months and median PFS 5.3 months) ( Garon et al., 2019 ). The curative effect was significantly lower than that of other patients who received TKI treatment naive (median OS 18.6 months and median PFS 4 months). A randomized phase III trial, IMpower 150, investigated the efficacy of atezolizumab combined with bevacizumab and chemotherapy in NSCLC, and key subgroup analyses were conducted for patients with EGFR-sensitive mutations ( Reck et al., 2019 ). It is noteworthy that it showed a favorable response for this combination pattern when compared with bevacizumab combined with the chemotherapy group (median duration of response: 11.1 vs. 5.6 months).
On the other hand, several clinical studies have demonstrated that EGFR/ALK-positive mutation NSCLC was not suitable for ICI monotherapy or TKIs combined with ICIs. In advanced NSCLC patients with sensitive mutations, the response rate of PD-1 inhibitors was less than 5%, while the response rate of corresponding TKIs was 70%. In the combination therapy of ICIs and EGFR-TKIs, the incidence of side effects was significantly increased ( Hsu et al., 2019 ). A retrospective study conducted in Japan showed that among 20,516 advanced NSCLC patients with EGFR-sensitive mutation, the total incidence rate of ILD or immune pneumonia was 4.8%; the incidence rates of pneumonia were 4.6% and 6.4% when treated with TKIs or nivolumab, respectively, and 25.7% in the combination therapy. When further stratified the patients by treatment with and without nivolumab, the odds ratios of EGFR-TKI-associated immune pneumonia in cases with and without nivolumab treatment were 5.09 and 1.22, respectively ( Oshima et al., 2018 ). Nivolumab even developed explosive disease progression in two patients with lung adenocarcinoma who were resistant to chemotherapy and EGFR-TKI therapy (out of 155 participants). Within 2 months, the tumors increased by 53.6% and 125%, respectively, several times faster than before ICI was introduced ( Kato et al., 2017 ). In other words, high risk and probability of adverse events severely limit the options for the sequential therapy of ICIs and TKIs.
In clinical practice, it is often the case that a short time of immunotherapy or immunochemotherapy was conducted at first, and then, patients were changed to small-molecule targeted therapy. This is due to the fact that the advanced NSCLC patients often need an urgent therapy to control the progression of disease and fill the gap while waiting for the genetic test results. Schoenfeld et al. (2019) have reported that in NSCLC patients with EGFR-sensitive mutations, the treatment of osimertinib within 3 months after ICIs increased the incidence of grades 3–5 adverse reactions (interstitial pneumonia or enterocolitis). By contrast, no severe adverse reactions were observed among patients treated with either osimertinib followed by PD-1/PD-L1 (0 of 29) or PD-1/PD-L1 followed by other EGFR-TKIs (afatinib or erlotinib, 0 of 27). It was considered that it appears to be drug-specific, rather than class-specific, the interaction between osimertinib and PD-1 inhibitors. In addition, there were also a number of other studies on the sequential treatment with osimertinib and ICIs. Both Kotake et al. (2017) and Mamesaya et al. (2017) have all found a high incidence of interstitial pneumonia in retrospective case collections with nivolumab prior to osimertinib. Uchida et al. (2019) have reported the same phenomenon that interstitial pneumonia occurred in the sequential treatment of ICIs followed by osimertinib; however, it was not the case in the sequential treatment of ICIs followed by first- or second-generation EGFR-TKIs. The administration of osimertinib immediately after treatment with PD-1 inhibitors was observed in three patients. In addition, Oshima et al. (2018) have investigated the relationship between the types of ICIs and the occurrence of interstitial pneumonia. In comparison with monotherapy, a higher proportion of interstitial pneumonia was observed for concurrent or sequential treatment of nivolumab and EGFR-TKIs. Lin JJ. et al. (2019 ) have also reported that the risk of hepatotoxicity morbidity experienced an increase in their analysis in a series of patients who received immunotherapy before crizotinib. Jia et al. (2019b) have demonstrated that the combination treatment of EGFR-TKIs and ICIs may induce overlapping toxicities in an EGFR-mutated mouse model. Based on these findings, we should soberly realize that when TKIs were combined with ICIs, the sequence and the timing may influence the severity of pneumonitis. An overview of the studies mentioned earlier is shown in Table 1 .
Nowadays, accumulating therapies with efficacy are available clinically for patients with NSCLC. Apart from surgery and conventional chemotherapy, targeted therapies could achieve significant efficacy and low adverse events and improve the quality of life for patients with specific genetic mutations. The particular system of targeted therapies elucidates the possibility of long-term treatment in the future, yet the development of new generations of targeted TKIs to overcome the acquired resistance is still an urgent task. Immunotherapy, as a novel therapy for the treatment of NSCLC in recent years, has demonstrated significant efficacy in clinical practice as monotherapy or combined with chemotherapy, and higher ORR will be achieved in long-term treatment. Several clinical trials are exploring the clinical application of ICIs at different stages of NSCLC as monotherapy or combination therapy. As of 2021, there are thousands of clinical trials at clinicaltrials.gov about different kinds of ICIs for the treatment of lung cancer, such as pembrolizumab, nivolumab, and atezolizumab . Although a long-term survival could be achieved for ICIs, a series of immune-related adverse events could not be ignored. It has been reported that the activation of the oncogenic EGFR pathway enhances the susceptibility of the lung tumors to PD-1 blockade in the mouse model, suggesting the combination of the PD1 blockade with EGFR TKIs may be a promising therapeutic strategy. Hence, in order to acquire maximum benefit for patients, the combination of TKIs and ICIs has been explored in previous clinical studies. Unfortunately, when small-molecule TKIs were combined with ICIs, the original treatment effect was not significantly improved, whereas the probability of grade 3 and 4 adverse reactions was increased. In the TATTON study, the combination use of osimertinib and durvalumab induces the high incidence of interstitial lung disease, which led to the mandatory discontinuation of several similar clinical studies ( Ahn et al., 2016 ). The combination of gefitinib combined with durvalumab demonstrated encouraging activity but higher incidence of grade 3/4 liver enzyme elevation (40–70%) ( Gibbons et al., 2016 ). The treatment-related grade 3–4 adverse events were observed in 39% of patients when treated with atezolizumab combined with erlotinib ( Ma et al., 2016b ). The phase 1b JAVELIN 101 Lung trial evaluated the second-line combination of avelumab and crizotinib in ALK-negative NSCLC patients, and 2 out of 12 patients (16.7%) had dose-limiting hepatotoxicity. Other notable dose-limiting toxicities included rash, febrile neutropenia, and QT prolongation. However, in the cohort of ALK-translocation–positive NSCLC in this study, no dose-limiting toxicities were observed when avelumab was combined with lorlatinib ( Alice and Shaw, 2018 ). Numerous studies have shown that the expression of TME and PD-L1 will be affected by pretreatment with TKIs, thus affecting the efficacy of immunotherapy. Previous studies have reported that the high expression of PD-L1 may be related to the acquired resistance of EGFR-TKI. Hence, EGFR-TKI may not be suitable for patients with wild-type EGFR or high expressions of PD-L1 ( Su et al., 2018 ; Hsu et al., 2019 ). The changes in the TME may influence the selection of EGFR-TKIs and ICI combination therapy, and the development of the TME during treatment may also render the most effective treatment ( Gettinger et al., 2018 ; Yoshida et al., 2018 ; Yamada et al., 2019 ). It is possible to dynamically monitor the immune activity of the TME for a long time to maximize the impact of immunotherapy on patients. Based on previous studies, the safety profiles associated with concurrent TKIs and ICIs are quite variable among studies. It is of note that most of these combinations have generally shown somewhat higher toxicity than expected, and this unexpected high incidence of adverse events results in the limitation to further active investigation. Also, it reflects the potential exacerbation of intrinsic but typically minimal toxicities of various TKIs. To the best of our knowledge, no concurrent combination therapy of TKIs and ICI phase 3 clinical trial in TKI-naive patients is currently planned or actively accruing.
In addition to concurrent therapy, sequential therapy is also another important pattern of combination therapy. As it is known to us, the prior selection for patients with sensitive mutation (EGFR/ALK) is still TKIs. However, acquired resistance is inevitable and severely limits its clinical application. Based on the positive results of IMpower 150 and other phaseⅠ/Ⅱ trials, this sensitive mutation (EGFR/ALK) NSCLC will always conduct immunotherapy (monotherapy or combined with chemotherapy) after failure from first-/second-line targeted therapy. The sequential treatment as ICI pre-treatment with TKIs is the most common pattern in clinical practice, and ICI post-treatment with TKIs also exists. Most of the sequential treatment of TKIs and ICIs could achieve a longer OS, and drug-induced toxicity is tolerable. However, a previous study has also shown that ILD was observed in the treatment sequence of an anti-PD-1 antibody followed by osimertinib but not with first- or second-generation EGFR-TKIs. Jia et al. (2019b) have reported that osimertinib, rather than gefitinib combined with anti-PD-L1 treatment, could lead to lung injury in an EGFR-mutated tumor-bearing mouse model. This may be due to the durable immune response of the PD-(L)1 antibody. In contrast, EGFR-TKIs such as osimertinib take effect in a short period of time. They also speculated that the mechanism of ILD development is different between first-/second-generation TKIs and osimertinib, and the activation of T-cell effects by ICIs may upregulate this effect synergistically to cause ILD with osimertinib but not first- or second-generation TKIs. Jia et al. (2019a) have also reported that EGFR-targeted therapy alters the tumor microenvironment in EGFR-driven lung tumors. The optimal sequence of the treatment and strategies that modulate the tumor microenvironment to a state that may favor antitumor immune responses need to be considered when designing clinical trials. As it is known to us, the treatment of NSCLC is a “multi-station” manner, including the sequential therapy of TKIs and ICIs, which could provide a pivotal benefit for advanced NSCLC. However, further studies are still needed to explore the mechanism of adverse events and optimal sequence of the treatment and strategies.
In conclusion, the combination treatment of EGFR/ALK-TKIs and ICIs in NSCLC should be considered investigational; the specific drug, optimal dosing, sequence of the treatment schedule, interval time, treatment-related toxicities, and efficiency should all be considered in this type of combination therapy.
DL and NY designed the study and wrote the protocol. DL, DS, YZ, and BX drafted the manuscript. LY, DL, NL, and NY revised the manuscript content. All the authors read and approved the final manuscript.
This study was supported by the Hunan Medical Association Foundation (NO: HMA202001005), the Project of Changsha City Science and Technology Department (NO: kq2004129), the Hunan Pharmaceutical Association Foundation (NO: 2020YXH001), Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 2021JJ70025), and the Climbing Plan of Hunan Cancer Hospital (NO: 2021NSFC-A003).
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors, and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
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