Keytruda helps in fight to treat 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 trial, which took place from August 2013-August 2015, enrolled 1,034 patients from 24 countries from Europe, the USA and Asia (including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan). Patients with tumors that expressed the highest amounts of PD-L1 responded better and lived, on average, twice as long as patients treated with docetaxel alone (14.9 months versus 8.2 months), said senior author Roy S. Herbst, M.D., the Ensign Professor of Medicine and chief of medical oncology at Yale Cancer Center and Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven.
The immunotherapy was also definitively found for the first time to be effective in patients with low levels of PD-L1 in their tumors. In this study supporting the first-line approval, patients given KEYTRUDA 10 mg/kg every two weeks demonstrated a 37 percent reduction in the risk of death and those given KEYTRUDA 10 mg/kg every three weeks demonstrated a 31 percent reduction in the risk of death.