Survival benefit with erlotinib maintenance therapy in patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) according to response to first-line chemotherapy

In the placebo-controlled phase III SATURN study, maintenance erlotinib after first-line chemotherapy demonstrated significantly prolonged progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) in the overall study population of patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). After four cycles of platinum-based doublet chemotherapy, patients without progressive disease (PD) were randomised to erlotinib (150 mg/day) or placebo until PD or unacceptable toxicity. In this pre-planned analysis, data are assessed according to response to first-line chemotherapy (complete/partial response [CR/PR] or stable disease [SD]). Following first-line chemotherapy, 889 non-PD patients were included in the intention-to-treat population (55% SD; 44% CR/PR;