Trends in Checkpoint Inhibitor Therapy for Advanced Urothelial Cell Carcinoma (auc) at the End of Life: Insights from Real-World Practice.

395 Background: National guidelines recommend against chemotherapy use at the end of life. Five CPIs are now approved for aUC. We hypothesized that oncologists may have a lower threshold to initiate CPI in patients (pts) at the end of life, particularly among pts with poor performance status (PS), because of the perceived favorable toxicity profile of CPI. Methods: We conducted a secular trend analysis using the Flatiron Health Database, a large real-world electronic medical record-derived dataset. We used nonparametric tests of trend (p values reported as ptrend) to evaluate quarterly proportions of pts initiating CPI, chemotherapy, or no systemic therapy within 30 and 60 days of death, among 2959 pts diagnosed with aUC from 2015 to 2017. Results: 1637 pts died during follow-up and were eligible for analysis. 278 (17.0%) and 488 (29.8%) pts initiated a new line of systemic therapy in the last 30 and 60 days of life, respectively. The quarterly proportion of CPI initiators within 60 days of death increased from 1.0% to 23% during the study period ( ptrend < 0.001), with corresponding decreases in chemotherapy initiation and no systemic therapy. After CPI approval in mid-2016, CPI initiation significantly increased among pts with Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) PS ≥ 2 ( ptrend = 0.02) but did not significantly change among pts with PS 0-1. Initiation of any systemic therapy at the end of life doubled (17.4% to 34.8%) over the study period, driven largely by end-of-life CPI use. Compared to chemotherapy initiators, CPI initiators had slightly worse PS (table). Conclusions: In patients with aUC, there has been a dramatic rise in CPI initiation at the end of life particularly among pts with poor PS. Existing guidelines on systemic therapy initiation near the end of life should account for the increasing use of CPI. [Table: see text]