Adjuvant Pembrolizumab Improves QOL vs Ipilimumab or HDI in Resected Melanoma

Source: Onc Live, December 2022

Treatment with adjuvant pembrolizumab (Keytruda) resulted in favorable quality-of-life (QOL) outcomes vs high-dose interferon ? 2b (HDI) or ipilimumab (Yervoy) in patients with resected melanoma at high risk for relapse, according to the results of the secondary analysis of the phase 3 SWOG S1404 trial (NCT02506153).

The findings, which were published in JAMA Oncology, showed that patient-reported outcomes collected at cycle 3 of treatment using the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy Biological Response Modifiers Trial Outcome Index (FACT-BRM TOI) score were 9.6 points higher with pembrolizumab than comparators (95% CI, 7.9-11.3; P?<?.001). Investigators hypothesized that a difference of 5.0 points would signal clinically meaningful difference in QOL with pembrolizumab.

In the linear-mixed models, pembrolizumab surpassed ipilimumab and HDI by over 5 points through cycle 7, and in the post hoc analysis, the FACT-BRM TOI scores favored the pembrolizumab arm against both the ipilimumab (difference, 6.0 points; 95% CI, 4.1-7.8; P < .001) and HDI arms (difference, 17.0 points; 95% CI, 14.6-19.4; P < .001).
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