(Bloomberg) -- Merck & Co.’s best-selling drug Keytruda helped women with a hard-to-treat form of breast cancer live longer, according to the first study to show such a benefit in these patients.
After five years, 87% of patients with early-stage triple-negative tumors who took Keytruda with chemotherapy were alive, compared with 82% of patients given chemotherapy alone. The findings, presented Sunday at the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress in Barcelona, show the initial benefits seen with treatment persist.
The data are a huge advance because there are fewer targeted drugs for triple-negative breast cancer than other types, said Rebecca Dent, one of the researchers and a senior consultant at the National Cancer Center in Singapore. The outlook was much worse when patients developed the disease 20 years ago, she said.
“The results of overall survival presented at this meeting are critical because this hasn’t been approved in many parts of the world,” she said.
In the US, Keytruda is approved for multiple tumor types, including triple-negative breast, lung and cervical cancers. It’s currently Merck’s top-seller, netting more than $7.2 billion in sales in the last quarter.
Merck, known as MSD in Europe, announced in May that the study hit its goal of improving overall survival after five years, without providing details.
The detailed results were published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine, along with another advanced study detailing the drug’s benefit for patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer.
Those tumors returned 15 months sooner on average after surgery in patients who didn’t get Keytruda, compared with those who did, the study found.
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