medwireNews: Three-year results from the KEYNOTE-024 trial point to the durable efficacy of pembrolizumab monotherapy when used for the first-line treatment of metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
At this timepoint, the overall survival (OS) rate was 43.7% for the 154 trial participants who were randomly assigned to receive pembrolizumab 200 mg every 3 weeks for up to 2 years, compared with 24.9% for the 151 individuals instead given investigator’s choice of platinum-based chemotherapy.
The median OS durations were 26.3 and 14.2 months for the pembrolizumab and chemotherapy arms, respectively.
Presenter Martin Reck, from the Lung Clinic Grosshansdorf in Germany, noted that this benefit was observed “despite a majority of patients assigned to chemotherapy crossing over to pembrolizumab.”
Interestingly, of the 38 patients who received the full 2-year course of pembrolizumab, 81.6% had an objective response, with a median duration that was unreached at data analysis. And 71.1% of patients had disease control without needing any further treatment.
The safety profile continued to favor pembrolizumab even with the longer follow-up, with a lower rate of grade 3–5 treatment-related adverse events in the pembrolizumab than chemotherapy group, at 31.2% versus 53.3%.
These results were presented at the IASLC World Conference on Lung Cancer 2019 in Barcelona, Spain.
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IASLC World Conference on Lung Cancer 2019; Barcelona, Spain: 7–10 September