Racial Differences in Characteristics and Outcomes of Adjuvant Nivolumab for Muscle-Invasive Urothelial Carcinoma (MIUC) in the Real-World Setting

OBJECTIVES:

Historically, African-American/Black patients with bladder cancer have worse clinical outcomes compared with White/Caucasian patients. In the CheckMate 274 trial, nivolumab demonstrated a significant improvement in disease-free survival compared with placebo among patients with MIUC at high risk of recurrence following radical surgery; however, African-American/Black patients were underrepresented (< 1%). The objective of this analysis was to describe the characteristics and outcomes of MIUC patients treated with adjuvant nivolumab across different racial subgroups in a real-world setting.

METHODS:

This US retrospective medical chart review included African-American/Black and White/Caucasian patients with MIUC treated with adjuvant nivolumab following radical resection between 01-Sep-2021 and 10-Sep-2022. Patient characteristics and outcomes were abstracted from the medical charts by treating oncologists. Patient characteristics and landmark survival estimates based on Kaplan-Meier analyses were summarized descriptively.

RESULTS:

The analysis included 223 patients (African-American/Black: 62; White/Caucasian: 161). A numerically higher proportion of African-American/Black vs White/Caucasian patients, respectively, was male (74.2% vs 66.5%), less than 60 years old (27.4% vs 20.5%), unemployed (16.1% vs 5.6%), and had Medicaid at therapy initiation (14.5% vs 6.2%). Similar proportions in both groups had ECOG performance status 0-1 (82.3% vs 82.6%), received neoadjuvant therapy (58.1% vs 56.5%), and completed adjuvant therapy (67.7% vs 66.5%). The median follow-up time (12.5 months vs 13.1 months) and median duration of adjuvant therapy (11.0 months vs 11.3 months) were comparable. Similar estimates were observed for 12-month overall survival (96.7% vs 91.4%), 12-month disease-free survival (88.3% vs 88.4%), and 12-month distant metastasis-free survival (88.3% vs 88.4%).

CONCLUSIONS:

Despite higher rates of socio-economic risk factors among African-American/Black patients, this real-world study suggests similar effectiveness of adjuvant nivolumab among MIUC patients across African-American/Black and White/Caucasian patient populations.