BRCA1 and AEG1 mRNA expression levels do not significantly impact median progression-free survival in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and pretreatment T790M mutations receiving erlotinib plus bevacizumab.1 

The BELIEF trial evaluated the efficacy and safety of erlotinib and bevacizumab for the frontline treatment of European patients with advanced NSCLC harboring exon 19 deletion or exon 21 L858R EGFR mutations with or without pretreatment T790M. That study demonstrated that median progression-free survival was 16.0 months and 10.4 months for T790M mutation-positive patients and T790M mutation-negative patients, respectively.

Because low BRCA1 expression levels and low AEG1 levels have previously been shown to be associated with longer progression-free survival to erlotinib, researchers sought to assess the prognostic impact of BRCA1 and AEG1 mRNA expression in the baseline tumor tissue of patients enrolled in the BELIEF trial.


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For the analysis, researchers evaluated the baseline mRNA expression levels of BRCA1 and AEG1 in the 109 patients with EGFR-mutant NSCLC included in the BELIEF trial.

The results, which were presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2016, showed no statistically significant associations between the expression level of either biomarker and median progression-free survival.

Further, the association of BRCA1 and AEG1 mRNA with progression-free survival did not differ according to T790M mutation status (P = .81 and .42, respectively).

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 Among patients with T790M mutation-positive NSCLC, those with low BRCA1 expression had a median progression-free survival of 24.6 months compared with 15.4 months among patients with high BRCA1 mRNA (P = .63). There was a similar result observed for AEG1 levels (P = .93).

Reference

  1. Rosell R, Karachaliou N, Giménez-Capitán A, et al. The role of BRCA1 and AEG1 mRNA expression in advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients (p) with EGFR activating and pretreatment T790M mutations receiving the combination of erlotinib plus bevacizumab (E+B) in the BELIEF trial. Poster presentation at: AACR Annual Meeting 2016; April 16-20, 2016; New Orleans, LA.