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Cancer Therapy: Clinical |
Authors' Affiliations: Research Institute and Hospital, National Cancer Center, Goyang, Gyeonggi, South Korea
Requests for reprints: Jin Soo Lee, National Cancer Center, 809 Madu-dong, Ilsan-gu, Goyang, Gyeonggi, 411-769, South Korea. Phone: 82-31-920-1601; Fax: 82-31-920-1520; E-mail: jslee{at}ncc.re.kr.
| Abstract |
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Experimental Design: Eligible patients had no smoking history, stage IIIB or IV adenocarcinoma, Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status 0 to 2, and adequate organ functions. Treatment consisted of daily oral administration ofF 250 mg gefitinib for 28 days until disease progression. Responses were assessed after every two cycles of therapy.
Results: Of 37 patients enrolled, 36 were assessed for response. Twenty-five patients (69%) had partial response, 4 (11%) had stable disease, and 7 (19%) had progressive disease. Of 10 patients with evaluable brain metastases, 7 had objective responses in both intracranial and extracranial lesions, 1 had stable disease in the brain and dramatic response in the extracranial lesions, and 2 had progressive disease in both sites. After a median follow-up of 48 weeks (range, 4-70 weeks), 26 patients had disease progression, with median progression-free survival of 33 weeks, and 9 patients died, all due to disease progression. The median survival time has not been reached yet but the estimated 1-year survival rate was 73%. Common toxicities were skin rash and mild diarrhea but there was no significant hematologic toxicity.
Conclusions: Gefitinib showed very dramatic antitumor activity, even in the brain, with unprecedented survival outcome in never-smoker adenocarcinoma patients. These data support the use of gefitinib as a first-line therapy in this particular subgroup.
Key Words: gefitinib adenocarcinoma of the lung never-smoker Phase I to III Clinical Trials Lung cancer Tobacco
In Korea, lung cancer has become the leading cause of cancer death since 2000, and continues to increase in both men and women. The female lung cancer mortality rate, in particular, has increased more than 4-fold over the last two decades (17). Unlike most western countries, the majority of Korean female lung cancer patients had never smoked cigarettes in their lifetime (18), and their predominant histology is adenocarcinoma, which provides an ideal situation to evaluate the efficacy of gefitinib as a frontline therapy. We therefore conducted a phase II study to evaluate the efficacy of gefitinib as a first-line therapy in never-smokers with advanced or metastatic adenocarcinoma of the lung.
| Patients and Methods |
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4.0 x 109/L, neutrophils
2.0 x 109/L, platelets
100 x 109/L, hemoglobin
10 mg/dL, alanine aminotransferase or aspartate aminotransferase
2.5 times the upper normal limit, serum bilirubin
1.2 mg/dL, and serum creatinine
1.5 mg/dL. No patients had received any prior chemotherapy or molecular-targeted therapy. Brain metastasis was allowed provided that there were no clinically significant neurologic symptoms or signs. All patients gave a written informed consent approved by the Institutional Review Board of National Cancer Center. The study was done in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and Good Clinical Practice guidelines. Study design. Gefitinib in a dose of 250 mg was administered orally once a day until disease progression, unacceptable toxicity, or patient's refusal. Each cycle consisted of 28 days of therapy and administration could be interrupted for a maximum of 14 days.
As a baseline, all patients underwent a complete history and physical examination, including documentation of concomitant medications, performance status and history of smoking, laboratory tests (complete blood count, biochemistry profile, and urinalysis), and electrocardiogram within 14 days before the study entry. Chest X-ray, computed tomography scans of chest (including upper abdomen), magnetic resonance imaging of brain, and radionuclide bone scan were done within 4 weeks before the study entry. Because of the suggestion that BAC histology was an independent predictor of tumor response (15), all pathology slides and cytology slides were prospectively reviewed by a referee pathologist (E.K.H.) to identify two subgroups of adenocarcinoma, those with BAC histology and those without, as proposed by Ebright et al. (19).
Efficacy and toxicity evaluation. The primary end point of the study was response rate, which was assessed according to the WHO criteria (20) after each cycle by chest X-ray and every two cycles by computed tomography scans and magnetic resonance imaging where appropriate. The responses in brain lesions were also assessed using the same diagnostic technique done in baseline assessment and compared with the response in the extracranial sites. Complete response was defined as disappearance of all known disease for at least 4 weeks with no new lesion appearing. Partial response was defined as at least 50% decrease in the sum of the products of bidimensional diameters for at least 4 weeks without the appearance of new lesions. Stable disease was defined as failure to observe a partial response or complete response, with no progressive or new lesions observed for at least 4 weeks. Progressive disease was defined as a 25% or greater increase in the products of bidimensional diameters of any measurable lesion or the appearance of new lesions. Patients were evaluated weekly for toxicity during the first cycle and then every 4 weeks thereafter using the National Cancer Institute Common Toxicity Criteria version 2.0 (21). Duration of response was defined as the interval between the date of documented response and the date of documented disease progression. Progression-free survival was defined as the interval between the date of the start of treatment and the date of documented disease progression or death from any cause. Overall survival was defined as the interval between the date of the start of treatment and the date of death due to any cause. If a patient was lost to follow-up, that patient was censored at the last date of contact. All patients who were enrolled and received drug were included in the toxicity analysis. Data were updated as of December 31, 2004.
Statistical considerations. Simon's two-stage minimax design was used to determine the sample size and decision criteria for this phase II study (22). With the target activity level of 40% and the lowest response rate of interest set at 20%, we needed 33 evaluable patients with an 80% power to accept the hypothesis and a 5% significance level to reject the hypothesis. Allowing for a 10% loss to follow-up rate, a total of 37 patients were enrolled. Confidence intervals were calculated using binomial confidence intervals and comparisons of results were done with
2 test. Overall and progression-free survival and duration of response were calculated using the Kaplan-Meier method.
| Results |
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Response of metastatic brain lesions. Of the 10 patients who had evaluable brain metastases, seven had objective tumor responses both in the extracranial and intracranial lesions. One patient had stable disease in the brain lesions and partial response in the extracranial sites. The remaining two patients showed disease progression both in the intracranial and the extracranial sites.
Progression-free and overall survival. At the time of this analysis, with a median follow-up time of 48 weeks, a total of 26 patients had disease progression, including the 7 patients who had primary resistance, 2 of 4 patients who had stable disease, and 17 of 25 patients who showed initial responses. Median progression-free survival was 33 weeks (range, 4 to 54+ weeks) and median duration of response was 30 weeks (range, 11 to 49+ weeks). To date, 9 patients died, all due to disease progression, and 26 patients are still alive, 8 of whom are in remission state. Two patients who were lost to follow-up, one after one cycle of therapy and the other after two cycles of therapy with progression, were censored at the last follow-up of 4 and 8 weeks, respectively. The median overall survival has not been reached yet but the estimated 1-year survival rate was 73% (Fig. 1).
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| Discussion |
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In the literature, pretreatment factors that predict the response and survival of gefitinib-treated patients included female gender in addition to the adenocarcinoma or BAC histology and no smoking history (8, 9, 15). In the current study, female never-smokers tended to have a better response rate than the male counterpart. However, we had only three male patients in this study, which makes it difficult to draw any firm conclusion regarding the gender difference in gefitinib responses in NSCLC.
At the initial stage of study design, we postulated that patients with BAC histology might respond better than those without. In a prospectively collected data set on histologic subtypes of adenocarcinoma, we found that the response rate of patients with BAC histology tended to be lower than that of those without BAC histology. The reason is unclear but it may well be due to the small study population. Another possibility is the difficulty of establishing the firm diagnosis of BAC or its element using a limited biopsy samples obtained by percutaneous needle aspiration biopsies. Many of our patients had percutaneous needle aspiration biopsy of the lung lesions rather than open surgical biopsies, which made it difficult to establish the firm diagnosis of BAC histology in our series. In fact, we could not see any case of pure BAC. To evaluate the true efficacy of gefitinib in patients with pure BAC histology, we need a separate study. The case is the same with the male never-smoker patients with adenocarcinoma.
In this study, we observed gefitinib had antitumor effects on the brain lesions, which indicates that the so-called blood-brain barrier does not interfere with therapeutic efficacy of gefitinib for the metastatic brain lesions. Based on our data and previous experience with systemic chemotherapy (23, 24), it seems reasonable to use gefitinib for the treatment of brain metastases before considering palliative radiotherapy or surgery if there is no or minimal neurologic symptom. We also observed remarkable tumor response of brain metastases even in patients with significant surrounding edema and neurologic symptoms due to large brain metastases, who were treated in a non-protocol setting. Given the magnitude and promptness of response, gefitinib can be considered as a primary treatment for brain metastasis in an appropriate subset of patients even if there are neurologic symptoms or signs related to the brain metastases.
Gefitinib was initially developed to target EGFR, which is expressed more on tumor cells. Subsequent studies, however, found that the EGFR expression status itself did not correlate with the gefitinib responsiveness. Recently, two provoking studies reported that EGFR mutation, not simply the status of its expression, predicts the responsiveness of gefitinib (25, 26). Lynch et al. (25) reported that mutations in the EGFR gene, which were clustered near the ATP cleft of the tyrosine kinase domains, correlate with the clinical responsiveness to gefitinib. Paez et al. (26) reported that those EGFR mutations were more frequently observed in adenocarcinoma than in other NSCLCs, in women than in men, and in patients from Japan than in those from United States. The highest frequency of EGFR mutations (8 of 14, 57%) was observed in Japanese women with adenocarcinoma (26). Another study reported by Pao et al. (27) also showed similar types of EGFR gene alterations in 7 of 10 gefitinib-sensitive tumors and in 5 of 7 erlotinib-sensitive tumors. Interestingly, no EGFR mutations were found in 8 gefitinib-refractory and 10 erlotinib-refractory tumors (27). Collectively, these data indicate that adenocarcinomas arising in never-smokers comprise a distinct subset of lung cancer, frequently containing mutations within the tyrosine kinase domain of EGFR. Therefore, it would be very interesting to know the EGFR mutation status of the tumors of our patients. Unfortunately, however, we have only limited access to a dozen of tissue samples, on which EGFR mutation study is in progress.
To assess the potential effect of the second-line chemotherapy on survival outcome, we carefully reviewed the outcome of second-line chemotherapy in our patients. Only 2 objective tumor responses were noted in 17 assessable patients. Argiris and Mittal (28) reported a similar result; only 1 of 7 patients achieved partial response after a second-line chemotherapy following gefitinib therapy. These results suggest that the second-line chemotherapy had insignificant effect on the overall survival of patients enrolled in the current study. On the other hand, Niho et al. (29) reported that when platinum-containing regimens were given as a second-line chemotherapy, 9 of 23 (39%) patients achieved objective tumor responses. Therefore, whether the resistance to gefitinib can affect the responsiveness to subsequent chemotherapy remains to be seen, particularly to the non-platinum-containing regimens.
In conclusion, gefitinib monotherapy showed very promising antitumor activity against adenocarcinoma of the lung arising in never-smokers and good toxicity profile. These data support the use of gefitinib as a first-line therapy in this particular subgroup of NSCLC patients.
| Footnotes |
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The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked advertisement in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.
Note: Presented at the 95th AACR Annual Meeting, March 27-31, 2004, Orlando, Florida.
Received 10/21/04; revised 1/14/05; accepted 1/20/05.
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