Two rounds of chemotherapy in addition to two immune checkpoint inhibitors beats chemotherapy alone for treatment-naïve patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), phase three trial results show.

In the CheckMate 9LA trial, more than 700 patients were randomised to either nivolumab 360mg IV every three weeks and ipilimumab 1mg/kg IV every six weeks plus histology-based platinum doublet chemotherapy every three weeks for two cycles or to a control regimen of four cycles of the chemotherapy alone.

All patients in the open-label trial, which was carried out across 19 countries including Australia, were treatment-naïve with stage IV or recurrent NSCLC confirmed by histology, the authors reported in The Lancet Oncology.

“We hypothesised that dual immunotherapy combined with two cycles of chemotherapy would provide early disease control while building on the durable survival benefit provided by nivolumab and ipilimumab,” they wrote.