Although the patient numbers in our study were small, the objective response rate of 56%% among patients with measurable disease is promising.
There was a difference in objective RR between both groups (18% vs 0%), but this was not statistically significant (P =.33), possibly because of the small number of objective responses that were noted in this trial.
Nevertheless, only a relatively small fraction of patients exhibited an objective response and derived clinical benefits (Topalian et al, 2011).
Unfortunately, only a small portion of them shows an objective response to chemotherapy, becoming problematic to correctly predict patients' clinical outcome [ 1].
Despite high objective response rates to PST, a small proportion of patients will fail to respond or will progress during primary chemotherapy.
Combined chemo-/immunotherapy has shown high objective response rates and a significant though small proportion of long-term complete responders in metastatic malignant melanoma.
In other types of tumor, MPDL3280A achieved objective response rates at 23% in non-small cell lung cancer, 30% in melanoma and 14% in renal cell carcinoma.
A phase II study investigating the efficacy of PD0325901 in non-small-cell lung cancer was terminated in 2007 due to lack of objective response (unpublished data, clinicaltrials.gov identifier: NCT00174369).
SU5416, which is a small synthetic receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor of the VEGF receptor VEGFR-2, produced no objective response in 27 patients with refractory multiple myeloma.
The intention of this study was to identify the pretreatment characteristics predicting for the survival, objective response and symptom relief in patients with non-resectable, non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) managed in the Lung Unit at the Royal Marsden Hospital.
