Olaparib dose re-escalation in ovarian cancer patients who experienced severe and/or uncommon adverse events: A case series

Managing Adverse Effects Associated With Poly (ADP-ribose) Polymerase Inhibitors in Ovarian Cancer: A Synthesis of Clinical Trial and Real-World Data

The use of poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitor therapy is standard care in the management of patients with various malignancies including ovarian, breast, prostate, and pancreatic cancers. PARP inhibitors have been approved in different settings for patients with specific hereditary pathogenic variants, most notably homologous recombination repair pathways such as BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The vast experience with PARP inhibitors (olaparib, niraparib, rucaparib) has been in the management of epithelial ovarian cancer. There have not been any head-to-head comparisons of PARP inhibitors in randomized trials, and we can only perform cross-comparison on the basis of the reported literature. The three approved PARP inhibitors share several common adverse effects because of a class effect including nausea, fatigue, and anemia, but there are notable differences likely because of variations in their poly-pharmacology and off-target effects. Finally, patients included in clinical trials are often younger with a good performance status and less comorbidities than the real-world population, and hence, the potential benefits and adverse effects may not be superimposable. In this review, we describe these differences and discuss strategies to mitigate and manage adverse side effects effectively.

A Real-World Disproportionality Analysis of Olaparib: Data Mining of the Public Version of FDA Adverse Event Reporting System

Background

Olaparib, the world’s first poly ADP-ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitor (PARPi), has been approved for treatment of ovarian cancer, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer and prostate cancer by FDA. The current study was to assess olaparib-related adverse events (AEs) of real-world through data mining of the US Food and Drug Administration Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS).

Methods

Disproportionality analyses, including the reporting odds ratio (ROR), the proportional reporting ratio (PRR), the Bayesian confidence propagation neural network (BCPNN) and the multi-item gamma Poisson shrinker (MGPS) algorithms were employed to quantify the signals of olaparib-associated AEs.

Results

Out of 8,450,009 reports collected from the FAERS database, 6402 reports of olaparib-associated AEs were identified. A total of 118 significant disproportionality preferred terms (PTs) conforming to the four algorithms simultaneously were retained. The most common AEs included anemia, thrombocytopenia, nausea, decreased appetite, blood creatinine increased and dermatomyositis, which were corresponding to those reported in the specification and clinical trials. Unexpected significant AEs as interstitial lung disease, Pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia, folate deficiency, renal impairment and intestinal obstruction might also occur. The median onset time of olaparib-related AEs was 61 days (interquartile range [IQR] 14–182 days), and most of the cases occurred within the first 1 month after olaparib initiation.

Conclusion

Results of our study were consistent with clinical observations, and we also found potential new and unexpected AEs signals for olaparib, suggesting prospective clinical studies were needed to confirm these results and illustrate their relationship. Our results could provide valuable evidence for further safety studies of olaparib.