Immunotherapy
Adding the immunotherapy medicine camrelizumab to chemotherapy offered better outcomes than chemotherapy alone for TNBC.
Early research hints at why breast cancer cells that survive chemotherapy also don’t respond to immunotherapy.
People diagnosed with cancer receiving immune checkpoint inhibitor medicines who also receive an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine don’t have a greater risk of side effects from either the vaccine or the immunotherapy medicines.
When more Black women diagnosed with early-stage, triple-negative breast cancer joined a study on Imfinzi, the results showed the immunotherapy was as effective in Black women as it was in women of other races and ethnicities.
Adding the immunotherapy medicine Keytruda to chemotherapy improved overall survival more than chemotherapy alone in people diagnosed with metastatic triple-negative, strongly PD-L1-positive breast cancer, according to the KEYNOTE-355 study’s final results.
Six months after receiving their second dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, people diagnosed with solid tumor cancers had about the same antibody levels as people who hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer.
On Aug. 27, 2021, Genentech announced it is voluntarily withdrawing the breast cancer indication from the immunotherapy medicine Tecentriq in the United States.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Keytruda plus chemotherapy before surgery, followed by Keytruda alone after surgery to treat early-stage triple-negative breast cancer with a high risk of recurrence.
The immunotherapy medicine Keytruda plus chemotherapy before surgery and Keytruda alone after surgery improved event-free survival better than chemotherapy alone in women diagnosed with early-stage triple-negative breast cancer.
Nearly all the people in a clinical trial who were receiving systemic intravenous cancer treatment had an adequate immune response to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
On Nov. 13, 2020, the FDA approved the immunotherapy Keytruda in combination with chemotherapy to treat unresectable locally advanced or metastatic triple-negative, PD-L1-positive breast cancer.
When treating locally advanced or metastatic triple-negative breast cancer for the first time, adding Tecentriq to Taxol did not improve survival, while adding Tecentriq to Abraxane did improve survival.
Keytruda plus chemotherapy offered better progression-free survival than chemotherapy alone as the first treatment for metastatic triple-negative breast cancer or triple-negative breast cancer that has come back in the breast area but can't be removed with surgery, with high levels of the PD-L1 protein.
Results from two studies on using the immunotherapy medicines Tecentriq or Keytruda along with chemotherapy to treat early-stage triple-negative breast cancer before surgery suggested that Keytruda offered benefits while Tecentriq did not.
The combination of the immunotherapy Keytruda and chemotherapy before surgery to remove early-stage, triple-negative breast cancer led to a better pathologic complete response than chemotherapy alone.