Keytru­da PhI­II fail­ure in gas­tric can­cer blights Mer­ck­'s quest for front­line dom­i­nance

A year and a half af­ter scor­ing an ap­proval to use Keytru­da in third-line gas­tric can­cer, Mer­ck has run in­to a wall try­ing to ap­ply the PD-1 star in the front­line set­ting.

In an up­date for the KEYNOTE-062, the com­pa­ny $MRK dis­closed that Keytru­da as a monother­a­py proved non-in­fe­ri­or to chemother­a­py — the cur­rent stan­dard of care for ad­vanced gas­tric or gas­troe­sophageal junc­tion ade­no­car­ci­no­ma — in over­all sur­vival. In com­bi­na­tion, though, Keytru­da plus chemo was not found to be su­pe­ri­or for ei­ther OS or pro­gres­sion-free sur­vival com­pared with chemo alone. That like­ly meant more miss­es than hits in the pri­ma­ry end­points, list­ed as PFS and OS on clin­i­cal­tri­als.gov.

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