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VIDEO: Pembrolizumab may ‘irrevocably alter’ the treatment landscape of NSCLC
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COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Corey J. Langer, MD, director of thoracic oncology at University of Pennsylvania Abramson Cancer Center and professor of medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, discusses the changes in the therapeutic landscape of non–small cell lung cancer at the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress.
The KEYNOTE-024 trial — designed to evaluate pembrolizumab (Keytruda, Merck) vs. investigator’s choice of platinum-based chemotherapy in untreated patients with advanced NSCLC whose tumors had high PD-L1 expression — demonstrated significantly extended PFS and OS in the pembrolizumab treatment group.
“I would suspect that, sometime toward the end of this year or early 2017, pembrolizumab will garner approval as a single agent in this specific population,” Langer added. “The number of individuals [who could benefit] probably equals or exceeds the number of individuals who have EGFR mutations and ALK translocations combined, so the therapeutic landscape will be irrevocably altered.”