PHILADELPHIA (January 26, 2024) — While race can influence treatment recommendations for certain forms of cancer, a new study presented today by researchers at Fox Chase Cancer Center has shown that immune checkpoint inhibitor-based treatment (ICI), a type of immunotherapy, is an equally effective frontline treatment for both Black and white patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma.
“There is a potential benefit of ICI in both Black and white populations, so we should not differentiate the treatment options based on race,” said Jasmeet Kaur, MD, the lead author on the study and a second-year fellow in the Department of Hematology/Oncology at Fox Chase.
Previous research into the immune gene signatures that are used to predict a patient’s response to ICI-based treatment for renal cell carcinoma has found differences between Black and white patients. Therefore, Kaur and her coauthors conducted their study to compare whether these differences in gene signatures translated into differences in real-world progression-free survival for Black and white renal cell carcinoma patients.
The team, including senior author Pooja Ghatalia, MD, an Associate Professor in the Department of Hematology/Oncology at Fox Chase, retrospectively reviewed anonymous records for 2,592 Fox Chase patients who received either ICI-based therapy or sunitinib, a targeted cancer drug, as frontline treatment for metastatic renal cell carcinoma after 2011.
Nearly 92% of the patients were white, and 56% of both white and Black patients received ICI-based treatment. Kaur and her colleagues then compared the results of the two treatment types within the Black and white patient groups separately, followed by a comparison, by race, across the full cohort.
In the separate analyses, both Black and white patients receiving ICI-based treatment showed better real-world progression-free survival than those receiving sunitinib. When the analyses were adjusted to compare treatment outcomes between Black and white patients across the full cohort, the researchers found no significant difference in outcomes.
As a result, the researchers concluded that treatment recommendations should be the same for Black and white patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma and that ICI-based therapy should be offered to both.
Kaur presented the study, “Comparison of Outcomes Between Patients of African and European descent with metastatic renal cell carcinoma receiving immune checkpoint inhibitors,” in a poster session at the ASCO Genitourinary Cancers Symposium, which is being held January 25–27 in San Francisco.