Prognostic Biomarkers of Salvage Chemotherapy Following Nivolumab Treatment for Recurrent and/or Metastatic Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Recent studies have suggested the benefit of salvage chemotherapy (SCT) after immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) treatment for recurrent and metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (R/M HNSCC). We retrospectively examined the outcome of SCT and the usefulness of the serum C-reactive protein level (CRP) and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) as prognostic biomarkers. Thirty-nine patients with R/M HNSCC were enrolled in this study. Twenty-five patients (64.1%) received combination chemotherapy of weekly paclitaxel and cetuximab (PC) as SCT, and 14 patients (35.9%) received tegafur-gimestat-otastat potassium (S1), an oral fluoropyrimidine. In all patients, the response rate, disease control rate, median progression-free survival (PFS), and median overall survival (OS) were 45.2%, 85.7%, 6.5 months, and 13.5 months, respectively. No chemotherapy-related deaths were observed. These PC groups had low CRP (<1.2 mg/dL) or low NLR (<7.0) values at the time of SCT induction, which was significantly associated with an improved OS (p = 0.0440, p = 0.0354). A multivariate analysis also showed that a lower CRP value was significantly associated with a better OS (p = 0.0078). We clarified the usefulness of the PC and S1 regimens as SCT. In addition, SCT with the PC regimen showed a better prognosis with a lower CRP or NLR at induction than a higher CRP or NLR. This is the first report on biomarkers of SCT in R/M HNSCC.