Adding low-dose radiation to the current standard first-line treatment, durvalumab plus etoposide-platinum chemotherapy, appears to improve survival outcomes in patients with extensive-stage small cell lung cancer (SCLC), suggested new findings from a small, single-arm study.
The analysis, presented at the 2024 European Lung Cancer Congress, revealed that low-dose radiation improved patients' median progression-free and overall survival compared with standard first-line treatment, The standard first-line treatment results came from the 2019 CASPIAN trial, which found that patients receiving the first-line regimen had a median progression-free survival of 5 months and a median overall survival of 13 months, with 54% of patient alive at 1 year. The latest data, which included a small cohort of 30 patients, revealed that adding low-dose radiation to the standard first-line therapy led to a higher median progression-free survival of 8.3 months and extended median overall survival beyond the study follow-up period of 17.3 months. Overall, 66% of patients were alive at 1 year. These are "promising" improvements over CASPIAN, Zhang, a lung cancer medical oncologist at Sichuan University, Chengdu, China, said at the Congress, which was organized by the European Society for Medical Oncology., PhD, MBBS, a radiation oncologist at Belfast City Hospital, Belfast, Northern Ireland, agree