Data showing overall survival benefit for Keytruda in patients with at least 1% PD-L1 expression ups the ante for competitors Bristol and Roche, which will be presenting data for combinations in lung cancer at the American Association of Clinical Research meeting in April.
Merck & Co. Inc.'s PD-1 inhibitor Keytruda's(pembrolizumab) position in first-line non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is now even stronger with the KEYNOTE-042 study showing the drug works well as monotherapy across levels of PD-L1 expression.
NSCLC is expected to account for close to half of the total immuno-oncology (IO) market and Keytruda has been consistently performing, having secured the first and only monotherapy approval...
Takeda/Protagonist are awaiting 52-week data to confirm the results from the VERIFY trial of the drug in polycythemia vera.
Gilead chief medical officer Dietmar Berger said in an interview that the company plans to quickly take the results to regulators and foresees broad first-line use of the drug.
The drug boosted overall responses on top of the R-GemOx backbone, but the discussant pointed out that patients in waveLINE-003 were not very heavily pretreated.
