Merck & Co. Inc.'s Keytruda improved the life expectancy of certain lung cancer patients as a standalone treatment in a late-stage trial.
Keytruda boosts the immune system's ability to kill cancer cells by blocking healthy cells' PD-1 protein from linking up with a partner arm on the surface of cancer cells known as the PD-L1 protein.
In a phase 3 trial, dubbed Keynote-042, the New Jersey-based company evaluated Keytruda alone against chemotherapy in nonsquamous or squamous non-small cell lung cancer patients, without EGFR or ALK genomic tumor aberrations that drive cancer cell growth. Participants in the trial had tumors that had spread to nearby tissue or other parts of the body.
Non-small cell lung cancer, or NSCLC, is the most common type of lung cancer, accounting for about 85% of all cases.
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Results from the trial showed that patients whose tumors showed a PD-L1 level of 50% or more lived for a median of 20 months on the Merck drug, compared with 12.2 months on platinum-based chemotherapy.
Those with PD-L1 levels of 20% or more saw a median overall survival of 17.7 months on Keytruda versus 13 months on chemotherapy.
The patients with PD-L1 levels of 1% or more survived for a median of 16.7 months on Keytruda, while those on chemotherapy lived for 12.1 months.
"As monotherapy and in the combination setting, data continue to support the favorable effect of treatment with Keytruda on overall survival," said Roger Perlmutter, president of Merck Research Laboratories.
Perlmutter also said the company expects to submit this data to global regulatory authorities with the goal of "making Keytruda available to all of those patients who might potentially benefit from its use."
Keytruda is already approved in the U.S. in combination with chemotherapy as an initial treatment for metastatic non-squamous NSCLC. It is also approved as a standalone treatment for metastatic NSCLC patients with PD-L1 levels of 50% or more and those with PD-L1 levels over 1%.
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The 2018 American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting is expected to bring together more than 32,000 professionals from all over the world, with more than 2,500 study abstracts to be presented on-site and an additional 3,350 abstracts to be published online.


