Neoadjuvant tislelizumab and tegafur/gimeracil/octeracil (S-1) plus oxaliplatin in patients with locally advanced gastric or gastroesophageal junction cancer: Early results of a phase 2, single-arm trial

BACKGROUND: Recently, the combination of immunotherapy with chemotherapy has been recommended as first-line treatment of metastatic gastric/gastroesophageal junction (G/GEJ) in the clinical guidelines of many countries; the therapeutic potential of this application needs to be further investigated for neoadjuvant therapy of advanced G/GEJ cancer patients. METHODS: We performed a prospective, single-arm, open-label, phase 2 trial of the PD-1 inhibitor tislelizumab combined with S-1 plus oxaliplatin (SOX) in patients with advanced LAG/GEJ cancer. All patients underwent the three-cycle (21 days/cycle) treatment except for one patient who underwent two cycles. The primary endpoints were tumor major pathology response (MPR) and other events of tumor response assessed by the RECIST 1.1 and Becker criteria. Moreover, we constructed a few-shot learning model to predict the probability of MPR, which could screen those patients who might benefit from the neoadjuvant immunotherapy–chemotherapy scheme. This study was registered at https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT0-4890392. RESULTS: Thirty-two patients were enrolled; 17 patients (53.1%) achieved MPR (≤10% viable tumor cells) after treatment, and among them, 8 (25.0%) had a pathological complete response (pCR). The 1-year overall survival (OS) rate was 91.4% and the 1-year recurrence-free survival (RFS) rate was 90.0%. Adverse events occurred in 24 patients (65.6%) and grade III–IV adverse events were observed in 4 patients (12.5%) during the neoadjuvant period. Furthermore, we found commonly used preoperative assessment tools such as CT and EUS, which presented limited accuracy of tumor therapeutic response in this study; thus, we developed a therapeutic response predictive model that consisted of TNFα, IFNγ, IL-10, CD4, and age of patient, and the AUC of this FSL model was 0.856 (95% CI: 0.823–0.884). DISCUSSION: Our study showed that the neoadjuvant PD-1 inhibitor tislelizumab combined with SOX had promising application potential and presented no increasing treatment-related adverse events in patients with advanced G/GEJ cancer. Moreover, the predictive model could help therapists to evaluate the therapeutic response of this scheme accurately. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT0-4890392, identifier [NCT04890392].