University of Illinois Cancer Center member Paul Rubinstein, MD, is among the authors of a new study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology that examined the safety and activity of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) in people living with HIV and cancer.
Real-world data about the use of ICIs in people with HIV and cancer are lacking because they historically have been excluded from ICI trials, although they are at higher risk of developing cancers, including lung cancer, where ICIs are now the standard of care.
Study Details
This retrospective study, “Safety and Activity of Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors in People Living With HIV and Cancer: A Real-World Report From the Cancer Therapy Using Checkpoint Inhibitors in People Living With HIV-International (CATCH-IT) Consortium,” included 390 people with HIV who received ICIs while on antiretroviral therapy. The consortium included 33 centers across the United States, Europe and Australia, and was the brainchild of Abdul Rafeh Naqash, MD, Talal El Zarif, MD, Amin H. Nassar, MD, and Elio Adib, MD, from the University of Oklahoma, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Yale University School of Medicine and Dana Farber, respectively.
The authors reported that ICIs demonstrated differential activity across cancer types with no excess toxicity in people with HIV, and that the safety and activity of ICIs were similar between matched groups of people with HIV and people without HIV with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (mNSCLC).
Conclusions
“Overall, these results add to the growing body of evidence supporting the use of ICIs among PWH [people with HIV] to enhance their inclusion in ICI clinical studies. Therefore, similar to our matched cohort analysis in mNSCLC, future studies comparing large, matched cohorts of PWH and other cancer types are warranted for formal comparisons with the general population,” the authors concluded.