This paper aims to compare the approved second-line treatment options in metastatic renal cell carcinoma. A network meta-analysis (NMA) using the frequentist approach and generalized pairwise modeling was computed for the approved drugs in this setting. The results of this NMA showed that the combination of lenvatinib and everolimus yielded the lowest hazard ratio (HR) for progression-free survival (HR: 0.4; 95% CI: 0.21-0.75) and overall survival (HR: 0.55; 95% CI: 0.30-1.00). The great efficacy of this combination is limited by the prevalence of grade 3-4 adverse events (70.6%) leading to treatment discontinuation in 17.6%. This NMA is to the best of our knowledge, the first analysis of the approved regimens for the second-line treatment of metastatic renal cell carcinoma.
Keywords: metastatic renal cell carcinoma; network meta-analysis; overall survival; progression-free survival; second-line; systematic review.