Ritu Salani, MD, details the health-related quality of life benefits associated with dostarlimab in the treatment of advanced endometrial cancer, which includes improvements in back and pelvic pain.
CancerNetwork® spoke with Ritu Salani, MD, about how the addition of dostarlimab-gxly (Jemerpli) to chemotherapy yielded improvements in patient-reported outcomes among those with advanced endometrial cancer in the phase 3 ENGOT-EN6-NSGO/GOG-3031/RUBY trial (NCT03981796).
Investigators presented these findings at the 2023 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting.
Salani, the Gynecologic Oncology Fellowship Director at University of California Los Angeles Health and a Gynecologic Oncology editorial board member for the journal ONCOLOGY®, also described the immune-mediated toxicities observed in the trial as “manageable,” further supporting dostarlimab as an agent that may be easily incorporated into clinical practice for this patient population.
Transcript:
This is an important aspect of all trials: How is the patient doing with these [treatments]? If we're giving the patient therapies and they're doing very poorly on [treatment] but their disease is responding, are we really providing them any benefit? Patient-reported outcomes are such an important metric. These [results] were presented and showed that these patients actually did really well with the [dostarlimab] combination. Any time we add something to the standard therapy we worry if we are really harming these patients or causing worsening of patient-reported outcomes or quality of life.
This study really showed that these patients continued to have not only survival benefit, but also patient-reported outcome benefit with improvements in things like back pain and pelvic pain, and no additional toxicities. We, of course, see some more immune-related toxicities with the addition of immunotherapy but it's nothing that isn't well characterized and well managed by clinical practice.
We have good guidelines on when to take patients off therapy or hold therapy. In the [gynecologic] space we've been using chemotherapy with immunotherapy in cervical cancer for several years, so this will be an easy adoption or incorporation to clinical practice, which will have very manageable, well characterized toxicities that we're well equipped to handle.
Reference
Mirza MR, Powell MA, Lundgren C, et al. Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in primary advanced or recurrent endometrial cancer (pA/rEC) for patients (pts) treated with dostarlimab plus carboplatin/paclitaxel (CP) as compared to CP in the ENGOT-EN6/GOG3031/RUBY trial. J Clin Oncol. 2023;41(suppl 16):5504. doi:10.1200/JCO.2023.41.16_suppl.5504