Dr. Levy Discusses Pembrolizumab in NSCLC

Benjamin P. Levy, MD, assistant professor of oncology, clinical director of medical oncology, Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins Medicine, discusses pembrolizumab (Keytruda) in non—small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Levy says that single-agent pembrolizumab is the standard of care for advanced-stage patients with a PD-L1 score greater than 50%. However, recent data from the phase III KEYNOTE-189 trial, which randomized patients to pembrolizumab or placebo in combination with pemetrexed and either cisplatin or carboplatin, showed that there are early signals of a survival advantage in adding pembrolizumab to chemotherapy.

KEYNOTE-189 built on part 2 of cohort G in the KEYNOTE-021 trial, in which the pembrolizumab triplet elicited an overall response rate of 55% compared with 29% with the chemotherapy agents alone (P = .0032). The median PFS was 13.0 months with the addition of pembrolizumab versus 8.9 months for chemotherapy alone (HR, 0.53; 95% CI, 0.31-0.91; P = .0205).