This study is an exploratory clinical trial to investigate the feasibility of neoadjuvant chemoimmunotherapy plus extrafascial hysterectomy and pelvic lymph node dissection in patients with stage IB2 (2018 FIGO) cervical cancer and to observe the response rate to treatment, adverse effects and complications, and to assess the survival rate of patients.
In China, cervical cancer is the malignant tumor of the female reproductive tract with the highest incidence rate, and there will be about 112,000 new cases of cervical cancer and 14,000 deaths in China in 2022, with the number of incidence cases accounting for 1/5 of the global total. In recent years, with the early detection of cervical cancer and the wide application of HPV vaccine, more and more patients have been diagnosed at an early stage, which has prompted researchers to conduct in-depth studies and investigations into the treatment of early cervical cancer. to conduct in-depth studies and investigations. For a long time, the standard treatment for early-stage cervical cancer has been wide radical hysterectomy combined with pelvic lymph node dissection, with satisfactory results and 5-year overall survival rates ranging from 73% to 98%. The core of radical hysterectomy is wide hysterectomy, which ensures complete removal of the cervix and uterine body and achieves negative margins. However, this procedure is associated with high complications. In addition to ligamentous penetration, there are important neurovascular vessels in the parietal tissues, which will increase the risk of intraoperative complications such as bleeding, nerve injury, urinary tract and bowel injury, etc. Postoperative complications such as urinary retention, urinary incontinence, defecation difficulties, constipation, and sexual dysfunction may also occur in the immediate and long-term future, which will cause serious problems to the patient's quality of life, especially to the family harmony and social role of young patients. Realization brings serious disturbances. It has been controversial whether radical hysterectomy is necessary to remove paracervical tissue in early-stage cervical cancer. Studies have reported that the probability of paracervical infiltration is less than 1% in patients with tumors less than 2 cm in diameter, no lymphovascular invasion, and no metastasis in the pelvic lymph nodes, which provides a theoretical basis for conservative surgery. Extrafascial hysterectomy is a conservative surgical procedure that does not involve removal of parietal tissue and may be a safe and effective alternative to radical hysterectomy as an option for patients with unreserved fertility needs in early-stage, low-risk cervical cancer. In 2018, researchers used the SEER database to analyze and collect information from the period of January 1998 to December 2012 on patients who were diagnosed from January 1998 to December 2012 who were \< 45 years of age with stage IB1 cervical cancer, comparing the two surgical modalities of performing non-radical excision and radical excision for cervical cancer, showed no significant difference in disease-free survival between the two groups. Thus, radical surgery did not show better oncologic outcomes compared to cervical conization, hysterectomy, or hysterectomy alone in patients with stage IB1 disease. Based on the ConCerV trial, the first multicenter prospective trial to evaluate the use of conservative surgery for early-stage, low-risk cervical cancer, the 2023 NCCN guidelines suggest that early-stage, low-risk cervical cancer should be treated with radical hand surgery if it meets the ConCerv criteria (tumor size ≤2 cm, depth of infiltration ≤10 mm, and no metastatic lesions on imaging), a conservative surgical approach is feasible, i.e, cone excision with negative margins + pelvic lymph node dissection or SLN mapping for those who will preserve fertility, and total extrafascial hysterectomy + pelvic lymph node dissection or SLN mapping for those who will not preserve fertility. In particular, at the 2023 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, an international randomized controlled phase III trial (SHAPE) initiated by the Canadian Cancer Trials Group compared the prognostic profile of patients with early-stage, low-risk cervical cancer who underwent radical hysterectomy and pelvic lymph node dissection with those who underwent hysterectomy and pelvic lymph node dissection alone, which showed that patients who underwent simple hysterectomy had a non-inferior 3-year pelvic recurrence rate to those who underwent radical hysterectomy, and that the simple hysterectomy group had a significantly lower incidence of acute adverse events and postoperative urinary retention and improved vaginal function. The above clinical trials provide strong clinical evidence for conservative surgery for early-stage, low-risk cervical cancer and have led to a series of major guideline updates as well as an expansion of our focus to conservative surgical management of patients with early-stage cervical cancer at stage 1B1 or higher. For stage IB2 cervical cancer with tumor diameters of 2-4 cm, the current standard of care is radical hysterectomy, with a 5-year recurrence-free survival rate of 87%. An analysis of the 2018 SEER database showed that tumor lesion size ≥2 cm was an independent risk factor for disease progression, and other studies and literature reviews have shown that lesion size is one of the most important predictors of prognosis, with a statistically significantly higher risk of recurrence for lesions ≥2 cm. This may be related to the fact that larger tumor diameters simultaneously increase the proportion of vascular-positive, deep interstitial infiltration, etc., thereby increasing postoperative risk factors and the proportion of patients requiring adjuvant therapy after surgery. Thus, current guidelines only recommend non-extensive total extrafascial hysterectomy for low-risk early-stage cervical cancer, which has not been extended to patients with stage IB2, and direct conservative surgery in this population is rarely reported in the literature. Neoadjuvant chemotherapy is commonly used in the preoperative treatment of patients with cervical cancer with local tumor diameter \>4 cm. Neoadjuvant chemotherapy can reduce the size of the tumor lesion, decrease the risk of deep mesenchymal infiltration of paracervical tissue, paracervical metastasis, and positive margins for lymph node metastasis, increase the feasibility of radical surgery, and decrease the proportion of postoperative adjuvant therapy. There is increasing data to support that in patients with tumors ≥2 cm in diameter, cervical conization or radical hysterectomy after neoadjuvant chemotherapy preserves fertility and that the proportion of patients with intermediate and high risk factors requiring postoperative radiotherapy decreases significantly, with better oncologic and fertility outcomes. This also brings a new dawn for patients with stage 1B2 cervical cancer to undergo conservative surgery. With the rapid development of immunotherapy phase and treatment, the neoadjuvant treatment modality in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors can significantly improve the EFS, pathological remission rate, etc. in numerous solid tumors. Immunotherapy has achieved remarkable results in the treatment of advanced cervical cancer, and the treatment strategy of immune checkpoint inhibitors combined with chemotherapy has become the first-line treatment for advanced or recurrent PD-L1 expression-positive cervical cancer, and Cemiplimab has been added as a preferred regimen for the second-line medication for recurrent metastatic cervical cancer in the new NCCN guideline of 2024, which is not limited to PD-L1 expression-positive population. The latest studies in cervical cancer have shown that the introduction of immunotherapy into the neoadjuvant treatment phase greatly improved the pathological remission rate of patients with locally advanced cervical cancer (IB3, IIA2 and tumor diameter ≥4cm stage IIB/IIIC1r) to 38%, and further analysis of the patients\' postoperative pathological factors showed that the incision margin positivity rate was only 1. 2%, and the rate of paracervical tissue infiltration was only 2.5%, meanwhile, 69% of the neo-adjuvant immunotherapy tumor diameter ≤2 cm, and more than 50% of patients had deep mesenchymal infiltration ≤1/3. Mechanistically, more and more studies have shown that chemotherapy has an immunomodulatory effect, and chemotherapeutic agents commonly used in neoadjuvant chemotherapy for cervical cancer, including cisplatin and paclitaxel, can modulate the effector T-cell response by increasing tumor antigenicity, inducing the death of immunogenic cells, disrupting the immunosuppressive pathway, and enhancing the effector T-cell response to regulate antitumor T-cell responses. Further studies have shown that sequential administration of chemotherapy followed by immunotherapy preserves the ability of PD-L1 inhibitors to activate the immune response and may be a superior dosing strategy. Therefore, based on the application of neoadjuvant chemotherapy in conservative surgery for cervical cancer and the latest findings and theoretical basis of immunization combined with neoadjuvant chemotherapy, the investigators expect to achieve conservative surgical treatment for patients with stage IB2 cervical cancer through the application of neoadjuvant immunotherapy in stage IB2 cervical cancer by reducing the risk factors of patients to achieve therapeutic ConCerV criteria that meet the criteria for extrafascial total hysterectomy. Cadonilimab is the world's first PD-1/CTLA-4 bispecific tumor immunotherapy that achieves immune cell activation by "double de-braking", i.e., indirectly releasing and activating immune cells by simultaneously inhibiting the two immune signaling checkpoint pathways of PD-1 and CTLA-4, thereby enhancing immune activity and strengthening the anti-tumor effect. Anti-tumor activity. Cadonilimab, the world's first new dual antibody drug for tumor immunotherapy and the first new bispecific antibody drug in China, was approved by the State Drug Administration in June 2022 for the treatment of patients with recurrent or metastatic cervical cancer who have previously failed platinum-containing chemotherapy. In the Phase II clinical trial, the anti-tumor activity of cardunculus monotherapy was encouraging and the long-term survival benefit was significant. At a median follow-up of 14.6 months, the objective remission rate of Cadonilimab monotherapy in patients with advanced cervical cancer who had failed prior platinum-containing chemotherapy was 32.3%, with 14.1% (14 cases) achieving complete remission, 18.2% (18 cases) achieving partial remission, and the median OS had not yet been reached, with an 18-month OS rate of 51.2%. In addition, Cadonilimab has demonstrated excellent efficacy and safety in clinical trials in a variety of tumors, including hepatocellular carcinoma, lung cancer and neuroendocrine tumors. This study is an exploratory clinical trial based on recent studies of immune checkpoint inhibitors and neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with stage IB2 (2018 FIGO) cervical cancer, to evaluate the feasibility of extrafascial hysterectomy plus pelvic lymph node dissection in patients after Cadonilimab in combination with platinum-containing chemotherapy as neoadjuvant immunotherapy, to observe the treatment response rate, adverse effects and complications, and to assess patient survival.
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation
NA
Purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
NONE
Enrollment
50
10 mg/kg (body weight), 60 min, IV. Repeat every 3 weeks for a total of 3 cycles
260 mg/m2 for 30 min. Repeat every 3 weeks for a total of 3 cycles.
75-80 mg/m2, IV, 1 mg/min. Repeat every 3 weeks for a total of 3 cycles.
Extrafascial hysterectomy + pelvic lymphadenectomy (or SLN mapping) (For participants who meet ConCerv criteria)
Radical hysterectomy + pelvic lymphadenectomy ± para-aortic lymphadenectomy (or SLN mapping) (For participants who do not meet ConCerv criteria)
Cold knife conization (CKC) (For participants with tumor size ≤2 cm after 3 cycles of chemo-immunotherapy)
Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Wuhan, Hubei, China
RECRUITINGQilu Hospital of Shandong University
Jinan, Shandong, China
RECRUITINGPercentage of patients meeting ConCerV criteria
Defined as the proportion (%) of all patients who met all ConCerV criteria approximately 2-4 weeks after completion of neoadjuvant chemoimmunotherapy. ConCerV criteria: no LVSI, negative margins, squamous cell carcinoma (any grade), usual type adenocarcinoma (G1 or G2 / Silva A or B) or adenosquamous carcinoma (G1 or G2), tumor size ≤2 cm, depth of infiltration ≤10 mm, no metastatic lesions seen.
Time frame: 2-4 weeks after completion of neoadjuvant chemoimmunotherapy, approximately 2 years.
Objective Response Rate, ORR
the proportion of patients who had either complete response or partial response, assessed by independent central reviewers according to RECIST, version 1.1.
Time frame: 2-4 weeks after the last dose of neoadjuvant treatment and before surgery. an average of 2 years.
Proportion of patients requiring postoperative adjuvant therapy
according to the criteria for postoperative adjuvant therapy in the 2024 NCCN Guidelines, with tumor size based on size assessed by imaging prior to conization of the uterine cervix, and other pathological findings based on a combination of conization and hysterectomy results
Time frame: during and after surgery; approximately 2 years
Number of Participants with Treatment-Emergent Adverse Events as assessed by CTCAE v5.0
A treatment-emergent adverse events (TEAE) is defined as any unfavorable and unintended sign, symptom or disease temporally associated with the use of a study drug.
Time frame: Through study completion, an average of 5 year
the surgical complication
Intraoperative bleeding, vascular injuries, bladder injuries, rectal injuries, and ureteral injuries were measured by the need for suture repair; occlusive nerve injuries were measured by complete severance, and vascular injuries required documentation of the site of injury. Postoperative complications included: cervical stenosis, cervical insufficiency, ureteral/bladder/rectal/vaginal fistula, internal hemorrhage, pelvic infection, lymphocyst, lymphatic fistula, lower extremity edema, lower extremity venous thrombosis, urinary retention, nerve injury, and bowel obstruction.
Time frame: during and after surgery; approximately 3 years
Pathologic Complete Response
Pathologic complete response (PCR) refers to the absence of invasive/in situ cancer and/or lymph nodes
Time frame: during the surgery; approximately 2 years.
Overall survival, OS
as the time from randomization to death
Time frame: the time from randomization to death. A total of 7 years.
progression-free survival, PFS
the chances of staying free of disease progression for patients with cervical cancer.
Time frame: Until 5 years after the last case enrollment. a total of 7 years.
Time to successful postoperative urinary catheter removal, rate of urinary retention and incontinence
Time to successful postoperative urinary catheter removal: The time from the date of surgery to the date when the urinary catheter is removed and no longer needs to be reinserted. Urinary retention: Urinary retention was defined as the patient's inability to urinate successfully, defined as a residual urine volume of ≥100 mL in the bladder as determined by ultrasound after urinary catheter removal, or inability to urinate independently requiring reintroduction of a urinary catheter. Urinary incontinence: The presence of urinary incontinence was determined by history and physical examination.
Time frame: Until the end of this study, A total of 7 years.
Patient Reported Outcomes
1\. Quality of Life questionnaire (composed of the QLQ-C30, QLQ-CX24); 2. Sexual Health questionnaire (composed of the FSFI); 3. Health Economics questionnaire (composed of the EQ-5D)
Time frame: assessed at baseline, before cone biopsy, 1 week after hysterectomy (1 week after the end of adjuvant therapy if participants have), every time participants follow-up. A total of 7 years.
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