Immunotherapy is better than standard ‘extreme’ chemotherapy as first-line treatment for advanced head and neck cancer and can keep some patients alive for more than three years, a major new trial reports. The immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab (Keytruda) alone or in combination with chemotherapy extended patients’ lives compared with standard treatment – with some groups of patients treated with single-agent pembrolizumab responding for five times longer than with standard extreme chemotherapy. Crucially, the researchers showed it was possible to predict in advance who was more likely to benefit from pembrolizumab by testing for the PD-L1 immune marker in tumors and on surrounding cells – a key step in establishing the drug’s use as a new standard of care. Pembrolizumab has recently been approved in Europe as first-line treatment for patients diagnosed with advanced head and neck cancer, marking a key milestone in the use of immunotherapy as a standard part of cancer treatment. The phase III trial was led in the UK by The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, and involved 882 patients from all over the world who were diagnosed with advanced head and neck cancer. The research, published online on October 31, 2019 in The Lancet, was funded by the treatment’s manufacturer, Merck & Co., Inc., known as MSD outside the US and Canada. The article is titled “Pembrolizumab Alone or with Chemotherapy Versus Cetuximab with Chemotherapy for Recurrent or Metastatic Squamous Cell Carcinoma of the Head and Neck (KEYNOTE-048): A Randomised, Open-Label, Phase 3 Study.” Currently, many patients diagnosed in the UK with advanced head and neck cancer first receive an “extreme” triple combination of two chemotherapies and targeted drug cetuximab.Login Or Register To Read Full Story