A new study has shown that adding a type of therapy that activates the immune system, called pembrolizumab, to traditional chemotherapy improves the prognosis and even the chances of recovery for patients with the most aggressive type of breast cancer, triple negative, in a localized state, according to the promoters of this trial.
The new trial, presented at the Esmo 2024 Congress and published in ‘The New England Journal of Medicine’, demonstrates that it is useful to use immunotherapy in localized triple-negative breast cancer, in stages II and III, therefore, in earlier stages and in which it has not spread to other parts of the body.
“KEYNOTE-522” was conducted in 181 hospitals in 21 countries in Europe, North America, Asia and Latin America and involved 1,174 patients with this type of cancer not previously treated. 784 women were given immunotherapy plus chemotherapy before and after surgery and the rest received placebo plus standard therapy. And, after following them for more than six years, a “significant improvement in overall survival” was observed in the first group. After five years, 86.6% of the patients treated with pembrolizumab are still alive compared to 81.7% of the patients treated with chemotherapy plus placebo.
And event-free survival (of which the most common was disease recurrence or reappearance) was 81.2% versus 72.2%. Likewise, the time that patients lived disease-free was 55.3 months versus 54.1 months, respectively.
Possibilities of healing
“Increasing the chances of patients being cured by 5% means that out of every 100 patients treated with immunotherapy, there are 5 more patients who will be cured when they were not before. These are data that are very difficult to obtain. For example, sometimes chemotherapy only provides a benefit of 2% or 3% more. Therefore, the fact that 5% more patients survive 5 years is very significant data and, furthermore, rarely seen in terms of cures in the world of oncology. We are talking about the fact that today around 80% of these patients are cured,” explains Dr. Cortés, leader of the trial and co-author along with Dr. Peter Schmid.
Source: International Media
VTV/DR/CP
