Dr Lee Schwartzberg Discusses Immunotherapy Approvals in TNBC

Transcript

The FDA this year handed approvals to pembrolizumab and sacituzumab govitecan for the treatment of triple-negative breast cancer. What have the implications been for patients based on these approvals?

We’re excited about having new options for patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. Sacituzumab govitecan has proven to be effective in a substantial number of triple-negative breast cancer patients and it’s now improved in the third line and beyond setting, and my experience with it has been very favorable. We do see some neutropenia associated with it and managing that we had to get comfortable with, but the efficacy of the drug is substantial and it’s clearly a new component to our armamentarium of treating metastatic triple-negative breast cancer.

We’re also excited about now having KEYTRUDA in combination with chemotherapy for patients that express a CPS score of greater than 10%, where the progression-free survival was improved in that setting, and we’re able to use a number of different chemotherapy pairings with KEYTRUDA, which showed benefit. So, that gives us another option of a combination therapy in the roughly 40% or so of patients that do express PD-L1 in the metastatic first-line triple-negative breast cancer setting.