Real‐life patterns of use, safety and effectiveness of sunitinib in first‐line therapy of metastatic renal cell carcinoma: the SANTORIN cohort study

PURPOSE: To investigate sunitinib in the real-life first-line treatment of metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC). METHODS: SANTORIN is a French observational multicentre cohort. Patients initiating sunitinib in first-line mRCC therapy were included (January 2008 to April 2010) and followed for 24 months. Data were collected from medical files. The outcomes were 24-month overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS), response and safety. RESULTS: Three hundred two patients were included: median age, 64.8 years; male, 73.2%; clear cell mRCC, 83.1%; prior nephrectomy, 85.4%; >1 metastatic sites, 64.2%; brain metastases, 6.3%; ECOG-PS ≥ 2, 9.9%. Median duration of first-line therapy with sunitinib was 10.7 months. Initial sunitinib dose was 50 mg/day for 83.4% of patients; dose reduction occurred in 65.2%. Sunitinib was discontinued in 73.2% of the patients: for progression (61.1%), death (31.2%) or adverse events (6.8%). More than half (58.3%) had grade ≥3 adverse events, mainly hypertension (12.6%) and hand-foot syndrome (12.3%). The 24-month OS and PFS rates [95%CI] were 49.5% [43.7;55.0] and 16.4% [12.5;20.9], respectively. Median OS was 23.6 months [20.2;-] and median PFS 8.4 months [7.6;9.9]. Overall best response rate was 31.1%. CONCLUSIONS: Results from this large observational study suggest that effectiveness of sunitinib in first-line mRCC as predicted by clinical trials is maintained in real-life clinical practice. The expected benefit in poor-prognosis patients that were not evaluated in the pivotal clinical trial remains; however, questionable and long-term safety monitoring is still warranted.