Immunotherapy could benefit patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer

Pembrolizumab is shown to be effective against various types of cancer, including melanoma and lung cancer, where it has shown durable anti-tumor activity and acceptable toxicity in previously treated and untreated patients with advanced NSCLC. The found no significant difference between those who had the chemotherapy drug docetaxel or one or two dosage sizes of pembrolizumba.

This year, another drug targeting the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway, nivolumab, received approval for the treatment of advanced-stage NSCLC without any required biomarker selection of patients.

But the said drug has the ability to block those pathways and boost the immune response of a patient’s body, researchers explained.

A recent clinical trial revealed that an immunotherapy drug was proven more effective than chemo in lung cancer. This protein can protect the tumor from attacks by the immune system.

The open-label KEYNOTE-010 is the first study to assess the benefits of immunotherapy as second- or later line in patients with refractory lung cancer selected for PD-L1 expression.

“Because lung cancer remains one of the most common and most challenging cancers to treat, understanding the role that pembrolizumab can play in helping patients was essential to our development program”. Non-small cell lung cancer accounts for approximately 85 percent of all lung cancers. The FDA-approved dose of KEYTRUDA is 2 mg/kg every three weeks.

Prof. Herbst says that – as expected – the results were even better for patients with higher tumor expression of PD-L1, and treatment with pembrolizumab was associated with longer overall survival compared with chemotherapy (median overall survival of 14.9 and 17.3 months with 2 mg/kg and 10 mg/kg of pembrolizumab compared with 8.2 months with chemotherapy). All patients had experienced disease progression after platinum-containing systemic therapy and were stratified by PD-L1 expression level (tumour proportion score, TPS?50% vs 1-49%). KEYTRUDA blocks the interaction between PD-1 and its ligands, PD-L1 and PD-L2, thereby activating T lymphocytes which may affect both tumor cells and healthy cells.

In this trial, the safety profile of pembrolizumab was consistent with that from previous NSCLC studies. Participants were randomly assigned to different treatment groups, with two groups receiving differing doses of immunotherapy, and a third group receiving the chemotherapy.

Many lung cancer patients do not receive a diagnosis until it is too late to treat the condition because lung cancer is not easy to find. Among patients treated with pembrolizumab (2 mg/kg and 10 mg/kg, respectively), median PFS was 5.0 months and 5.2 months, compared to 4.1 months for docetaxel.