Conventional chemotherapy was associated with an improvement in the survival of patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer, a new study found

June-Koo Lee, M.D., of Seoul National University Hospital, Seoul, Republic of Korea, and colleagues performed a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials that compared first-generation EGFR TKI (erlotinib and gefitinib) treatment with conventional chemotherapy in patients with advanced NSCLC without mutation of the EGFR gene. The authors identified 11 randomized controlled trials, with 1,605 patients with WT EGFR, which met criteria for inclusion in the meta-analysis.
The results indicated that chemotherapy was associated with longer PFS compared with EGFR TKI in patients with WT tumors. For a median (midpoint) PFS of 6.4 months in patients treated with standard chemotherapy, the corresponding reduction of PFS in patient receiving EGFR TKI would be 1.9 months.
The objective response rate (defined as the proportion of complete response and partial responses among all evaluable patients) was also higher with chemotherapy (92/549, 16.8 percent) compared with TKI (39/540, 7.2 percent). However, the overall survival did not differ between the two groups.
"… this study suggests that, in patients with WT EGFR tumors, conventional chemotherapy could be a preferable treatment option over EGFR TKI, although this recommendation cannot be conclusive because the overall comparisons were not based on randomization. Furthermore, the toxicity outcome was not assessed," the authors write.
Source-Eurekalert