Saumell Y, et al. - Herein, the authors scrutinized the effectiveness of nimotuzumab combined with onco-specific treatment, in Cuban real-life patients with locally advanced or metastatic esophageal squamous cell carcinoma. A rise was reported in the survival of real-world patients with locally advanced or metastatic esophageal squamous cell carcinoma via nimotuzumab treatment concurrent with chemoradiotherapy. In order to affirm the therapeutic effectiveness of nimotuzumab in esophageal cancer, advanced studies were necessitated.

Methods

• Researchers conducted a comparative and retrospective effectiveness study.
• They recruited 93 patients treated with nimotuzumab, who were matched, with use of propensity score matching, with patients who received a diagnosis of locally advanced or metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the esophagus in three Cuban provinces, reported between 2011 and 2015 to the National Cancer Registry.
• Event-time distributions were computed through the Kaplan-Meier method.
• Through the log-rank statistics, authors compared the overall survival between groups.
• In order to evaluate the effect of nimotuzumab on short-term and long-term survival populations, a two-component mixture model assuming a Weibull distribution was fitted.

Results

• A rise was noted in the median overall survival in patients treated with nimotuzumab (11.9 months versus 6.5 months without treatment).
• In addition, there was an increase in the 1-year survival rate (54.0% versus 21.9% without treatment).
• For patients treated with nimotuzumab, the 2-year survival rates were 21.1% and for the untreated cohort it was 0%.
• Statistically prominent variations were reported with regard to the survival between groups treated and not treated with nimotuzumab, both in the short-term survival cohort (6.0 months vs 4.0 months, p=0.009) and in the long-term survival cohort (18.0 months vs 11.0 months, p=0.001).