Analysis of Outcomes With Addition of Immunotherapy to Chemoradiation Therapy for Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer

To the Editor In their Original Investigation published in JAMA Oncology, Jabbour et al¹ reported promising activity of pembrolizumab addition to concurrent chemoradiation therapy (cCRT) in stage III non–small cell lung cancer. What was very striking to us was the extremely low rates of progressive disease (PD) during cCRT, with only 1 patient (0.5%) experiencing progressive disease as the best response. Such data with nearly no patient progressing during cCRT with addition of immunotherapy are like a dream come true for a thoracic oncologist. The beauty of the study is that objective response rate assessed by Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors (RECIST) version 1.1 was kept as a coprimary end point, which is exceedingly rare for cCRT studies. One-year overall survival as depicted in the Kaplan-Meier curve in Supplement 2 was 81.5% in cohort A (paclitaxel carboplatin and any histologic type) and 87% in cohort B (pemetrexed cisplatin with nonsquamous histologic type).¹ This was despite the high discontinuation rate of 59.8% in cohort A and 39.2% in cohort B.