Differential safety profiles of durvalumab monotherapy and durvalumab in combination with tremelimumab in adult patients with advanced cancers.

BACKGROUND

Durvalumab (D; anti-programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1)) monotherapy or in combination with tremelimumab (T; anti-cytotoxic T lymphocyte antigen-4 (CTLA-4)) have demonstrated efficacy in advanced cancers. However, higher incidences of adverse events (AEs) and immune-mediated AEs (imAEs) were observed with D+T compared with D monotherapy in clinical trials. While safety data have been published from individual clinical trials of D with or without T, we report a comprehensive safety analysis of D and D+T in a broad population and across multiple tumor types.

METHODS

A retrospective analysis was conducted using safety data pooled from phase I to III clinical trials in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), recurrent or metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck, unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma (uHCC), gastric adenocarcinoma, or metastatic urothelial carcinoma, who received either D monotherapy (N=4,045; 13 clinical trials) or D+T (N=3,319; 14 clinical trials).

RESULTS

Compared with D monotherapy, patients treated with D+T had higher incidences of maximum grade 3 or 4 AEs (49.5% vs 39.6%), treatment-related AEs of maximum grade 3 or 4 (22.1% vs 11.5%), any imAE (30.2% vs 17.4%), and imAEs of maximum grade 3 or 4 (11.0% vs 4.3%). The majority of imAEs were non-serious, low grade and manageable in both datasets. Higher incidences of imAEs with D+T were mainly driven by diarrhea/colitis (7.6% vs 1.9%) and dermatitis/rash (4.7% vs 1.6%). Fatal imAEs were infrequent and similar between D+T and D monotherapy (0.4% vs 0.3%). Across tumor types, hypothyroid events were the most frequently reported imAE of any grade (D+T: 9.7%; D monotherapy: 7.6%). As expected, given organ involvement, pneumonitis was most frequently reported in NSCLC (D+T: 5.4%; D monotherapy: 4.7%), while hepatic events were most frequently reported in uHCC (D+T: 7.9%; D monotherapy: 6.1%).

CONCLUSIONS

Higher incidences of imAEs were observed with D+T compared with D monotherapy across tumor types; however, fatal imAEs were infrequent and similar in both datasets. ImAEs in the D+T dataset were consistent with the safety profiles of the individual agents and dual PD-(L)1 and CTLA-4 inhibition. Overall, the safety profiles of D monotherapy and D+T were tolerable and manageable across tumor types.