KRAS analy­sis vaults Mer­ck­'s flag­ship Keytru­da back in­to the spot­light

The jew­el in Mer­ck’s crown — Keytru­da — just got more pre­cious.

On Thurs­day, the US drug­mak­er broke out an ex­plorato­ry analy­sis show­ing the check­point in­hibitor helped pa­tients live longer as the first line of de­fense in pa­tients with a form of non-small cell lung can­cer (NSCLC) whose tu­mors ex­pressed PD-L1, re­gard­less of KRAS sta­tus.

KRAS mu­ta­tions oc­cur in rough­ly a fifth of pa­tients di­ag­nosed with non-small cell lung can­cer, and da­ta sug­gest that these mu­ta­tions are as­so­ci­at­ed with poor re­sponse to treat­ment, not­ed Jonathan Cheng, vice pres­i­dent of on­col­o­gy clin­i­cal re­search at Mer­ck Re­search Lab­o­ra­to­ries, in a state­ment.

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