Objective: Immunotherapy used with or without chemotherapy has demonstrated significant clinical outcomes for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. The CheckMate-227 trial has shown that nivolumab plus ipilimumab indicates significant survival benefits as first-line treatment for non-squamous, advanced NSCLC patients. The KeyNote-189 trial has also concluded that pembrolizumab plus chemotherapy achieves efficacy for patients with the same disease characteristics as in CheckMate-227. The paper studied the cost-effectiveness of nivolumab plus ipilimumab vs. pembrolizumab plus chemotherapy as the first-line treatment for non-squamous, advanced NSCLC for adult patients from the US payer’s perspective.

Methods: A Markov model was built to analyze the cost-effectiveness of nivolumab plus ipilimumab in the first-line treatment of metastatic NSCLC. The health outcomes were estimated in quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) and were obtained from the literature. The cost information was from Veteran Affairs (VA) catalogue Federal Supply Schedule (FSS) price in 2021. In addition to the base case incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) and incremental net monetary benefit (INMB), probabilistic and one-way sensitivity analyses were also conducted to examine the impact of uncertainties on the results.

Results: In the base case, the incremental costs and QALYs in the nivolumab plus ipilimumab group were ($87, 795.30) and (0.13) for advanced NSCLC patients regardless of PD-L1 expression, which led to an ICER of $674, 610.82 per QALY and an INMB of $68, 273.98. When parameters varied from the deterministic estimates, the INMB results were the most sensitive around the utility of progressive disease state for both groups. The probability sensitivity analysis showed that using a willingness-to-pay threshold of $150,000 per QALY, the probability of nivolumab plus ipilimumab being cost-effective was 87.3%.

Conclusions: Nivolumab plus ipilimumab was not found to be cost-effective at the willingness to pay threshold of $150,000 per QALY as compared with pembrolizumab plus chemotherapy for non-squamous, metastatic NSCLC patients.