Keytruda adds to chemo's effect in hard-to-treat lung cancer

US pharma giant Merck & Co (NYSE: MRK) has announced the first-time presentation of results from a post-hoc analysis of patients with liver or brain metastases from the Phase III KEYNOTE-189 trial.

A post-hoc analysis from KEYNOTE-189, which evaluated Keytruda in combination with pemetrexed (Alimta) and cisplatin or carboplatin in patients with advanced nonsquamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) regardless of PD-L1 tumor expression and with no EGFR or ALK genomic tumor aberrations, was featured in an oral presentation at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia.

The findings showed Keytruda in combination with chemotherapy reduced the risk of death by 38% in patients with liver metastases and by 59% in those with brain metastases compared to chemotherapy alone.