In sur­pris­ing set­back, com­bo of Roche’s Tecen­triq and chemo fails to help pa­tients with triple-neg­a­tive breast can­cer

Roche broke ground last year when they se­cured the first FDA ap­proval for a check­point ther­a­py in triple-neg­a­tive breast can­cer, a no­to­ri­ous­ly dif­fi­cult-to-treat in­di­ca­tion that has been passed over by the wave of tar­get­ed ther­a­pies.

Now, though, doc­tors are puz­zling over why a com­bi­na­tion of drugs meant to make that ther­a­py more po­tent in­stead ap­peared to make it less ef­fec­tive.

Roche said Thurs­day that in a Phase III tri­al, com­bin­ing their PD-1/L1 check­point ther­a­py Tecen­triq with the chemother­a­py pa­cli­tax­el, did not sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­prove pro­gres­sion-free sur­vival for pa­tients with lo­cal­ly ad­vanced or metasta­t­ic triple-neg­a­tive breast can­cer over giv­ing those pa­tients chemother­a­py alone. In fact, pa­tients on the Tecen­triq-chemo arm had low­er over­all sur­vival than pa­tients on chemo, al­though the drug­mak­er cau­tioned that the tri­al was not pow­ered for that end­point and the da­ta were im­ma­ture.

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