Currently, there is no standard first-line maintenance treatment regimen for ES-SCLC. Although chemotherapy plus immunotherapy followed by maintenance therapy with immune monotherapy is the preferred first-line treatment option for ES-SCLC, the OS and PFS benefits are limited. The present study evaluated the effectiveness and safety of anlotinib plus immunotherapy as maintenance therapy after first-line chemotherapy combined with immunotherapy in ES-SCLC. The median PFS and OS of our patients were 13.6 (95% CI, 11.2–15.6) months and 19.5 (95% CI, 14.5–24.5) months, respectively, which were higher than those reported from chemotherapy plus immunotherapy followed by maintenance therapy with immune monotherapy. All AEs during maintenance therapy were tolerated and were regarded as grade 1–2, with the majority being fatigue, nausea, rash, and hemoptysis. Besides, no patients occurred treatment interruption due to AEs. These findings suggested that anlotinib plus immunotherapy might be a preferable first-line maintenance treatment option for ES-SCLC.
The IMPOWER-133, CASPIAN, ASTRUM-005, and CAPSTONE-1 trials demonstrated that adding anti-PD-1/PD-L1 antibodies to chemotherapy improved the OS of patients with ES-SCLC compared with chemotherapy alone, providing novel prospects for first-line treatment of patients with this disease. However, the immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy in the IMPOWER-133 (atezolizumab), CASPIAN (durvalumab), and CAPSTONE-1 (adebrelimab [SHR-1316])[24] trials only extended the median OS by 2.0-2.5 months compared to chemotherapy alone. Moreover, serplulimab plus chemotherapy improved median OS vs. chemotherapy alone by only 4.5 months in the ASTRUM-005 trial (Ying Cheng, et al.2022 ASCO. Abstract #8505). In the present study, the median PFS was 13.6 (95% CI, 11.2–15.6) months and the median OS was 19.5 (95% CI, 14.5–24.5) months, which were higher than those reported in the IMPOWER-133, CASPIAN, ASTRUM-005, and CAPSTONE-1 trials.
It has been shown that ICI monotherapy is unsatisfactory as first-line maintenance therapy for ES-SCLC. Results from the CheckMate 451 trial indicated that maintenance therapy with nivolumab plus ipilimumab (median PFS, 1.7 months; median OS, 9.2 months) or nivolumab monotherapy (median PFS, 1.9 months; median OS, 10.4 months) following first-line chemotherapy did not prolong the PFS and OS[25]. Gadgeel et al. conducted a single-arm phase II study to assess the efficacy of maintenance pembrolizumab in patients with ES-SCLC who had a response or SD after first-line platinum-etoposide chemotherapy, with an ORR of 11.1%, median PFS of 1.4 months, a 6-month PFS of 20.0%, a 12-month PFS of 13.0%, and a median OS of 9.6 months[26]. The exploratory analysis in the subset of patients who reached the maintenance phase from the IMPOWER-133 trial demonstrated a median PFS of 2.6 months for maintenance treatment with atezolizumab monotherapy[27]. These findings suggest the importance of maintenance therapy in the first-line setting of ES-SCLC and reflect that the survival benefits from first-line maintenance therapy with ICI monotherapy warrant to be further improvement.
Therefore, the excellent survival results in our study were considered to be attributable to the addition of anlotinib in the maintenance therapy. The unsatisfactory efficacy of ICI monotherapy maintenance therapy after first-line chemotherapy plus immunotherapy in ES-SCLC may be associated with the heterogeneity of SCLC as well as primary and secondary immune resistance[28]. Since anti-angiogenic therapies can modulate the tumor immunosuppressive microenvironment and eliminate immunosuppression, the combination of anti-angiogenic agents with immunotherapy might overcome primary and secondary immune resistance[29, 30]. Anlotinib is a multitarget TKI that facilitates tumor vessel normalization by improving the distribution of pericytes/endothelial cells[31] and increases the infiltration of immune cells by downregulating PD-L1 expression on the surface of endothelial cells[32]. In addition, anlotinib regulates immune cells to alleviate the immunosuppressive state in the tumor microenvironment[31, 33], and modulates cytokine levels to enhance the anti-tumor immune response[32, 34–35]. A single-arm phase II study revealed the encouraging efficacy of anlotinib plus toripalimab as maintenance treatment after first-line platinum-based chemotherapy in ES-SCLC, with an ORR of 6.7%, a DCR of 80.0%, and a median PFS of 12.5 months[36].
The real-world data from this study showed that the addition of anlotinib in the maintenance therapy did not increase the toxicity of ICI monotherapy and had a manageable safety profile. In the present study, grade 3–4 AEs were reported in 58.3% of patients, which was lower than that reported in the IMPOWER-133, CASPIAN, and CAPSTONE-1 trials (66.0%-86.0%). Moreover, no life-threatening AEs were observed. All AEs during maintenance therapy were tolerated and were regarded as grade 1–2, with the majority being fatigue, nausea, rash, and hemoptysis.
The main limitation of this study was the small sample size. Since there were few anti-PD-1/PD-L1 antibodies available for the first-line treatment of ES-SCLC between 2020 and 2021, and the high economic burden of the study drugs at that time, making only a small percentage of patients in the real-world setting received maintenance therapy with anlotinib and anti-PD-1/PD-L1 antibodies. However, with the approval of more immunologic drugs and the reduction in drug costs in recent years, the treatment regimen is accessible to more patients, allowing us to enlarge our sample size and follow-up more patients. Although the combination of anti-angiogenic agents with immunotherapy has been proven to be a promising therapeutic strategy in the treatment of a variety of solid tumors, there are still many issues that need to be resolved in clinical practice, such as determining the optimal beneficial populations, optimal dosage, and duration of administration, with the expectation of making the combination regimen more effective and safer, which is also a priority in future research.