The Impact of Age and Comorbidity on Effect of Treatment, Adverse Effects and Quality of Life in Danish Lung Cancer Patients Receiving Immunotherapy

The era of immune checkpoint inhibition (ICI) has changed the treatment regimen for incurable non-small cell lung cancer. With that the hope of a more long-term survival has been introduced. ICI is given as standard therapy for selected NSCLC patients with incurable advanced or metastatic (stage IV) disease. For this group of patients clinical trial reports present a 3 year overall survival rate of around 30%. Checkpoint inhibition is also known as programmed death 1 (PD-1) or programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) inhibitors and the PD-L1 tumor proportion score is currently the only clinically applicable biomarker used for this patient selection. New prognostic and predictive biomarkers are therefore warranted.The real life unselected NSCLC patient eligible for treatment with immunotherapy (check point inhibition) may be both older, with more comorbidity, more widespread disease and in poorer performance status than patients treated in clinical phase III trials. In this prospective single center study, clinical patient data, peripheral blood and baseline pre-treatment tumor biopsies are collected from NSCLC patients treated in any given treatment line with nivolumab, pembrolizumab or atezolizumab. Besides baseline samples consecutive blood samples will be collected for cytokine profiling and measurement of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) and micro RNA analysis. Baseline MRI of the brain screening for brain metastases and an extended CT-scan of thorax, abdomen and the lower extremities will be performed screening for venous thromboembolism (VTE). This along with comorbidity screening tools and quality of life assessments will provide detailed mapping of both patient and disease characteristics of potentially more frail patients including those with untreated brain metastases. By also registering immune related adverse events (irAE) prospectively in this study and doing additional blood samples in case of grade 3-4 toxicity, identification of biomarkers as predictors for effect and toxicity is durable. Hopefully this will contribute to more optimized treatment courses for those NSCLC patients to come.