ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, DESIGN CELLS
A combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy slows disease progression in patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer, according to results published Saturday (October 20) in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented the same day at the European Society for Medical Oncology 2018 Congress in Munich. The treatment—Roche’s immune checkpoint inhibitor atezolizumab (Tecentriq) alongside chemotherapy—was somewhat more effective in patients whose tumors were positive for the protein PD-L1 than for other types of tumors
The study “is a big deal and has been the buzz of the breast cancer research world,” Larry Norton, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who was not involved in the work, tells The New York Times.
Chemotherapy alone is the standard treatment for triple-negative breast cancers—those that lack receptors for estrogen and progesterone and do not overproduce the HER2 receptor—but cancers quickly become resistant to chemo. Once the ...
