Mer­ck high­lights cru­cial hit for Keytru­da in sec­ond-line esophageal car­ci­no­ma — but there are al­so 2 miss­es

Mer­ck has un­veiled a Phase III da­ta pack­age back­ing Keytru­da’s case as a sec­ond-line treat­ment for the tough in­di­ca­tions of esophageal and esoph­a­gogas­tric junc­tion car­ci­no­ma, un­der­scor­ing its ear­li­er con­fi­dence that the PD-1 in­hibitor rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant ad­vance in this field de­spite on­ly hit­ting one of three pri­ma­ry end­points.

The key num­ber the com­pa­ny wants to fo­cus on is 31% — the de­gree by which Keytru­da re­duced the risk of death com­pared to chemother­a­py in pa­tients with squa­mous cell car­ci­no­ma or ade­no­car­ci­no­ma, who had pro­gressed af­ter stan­dard ther­a­py and whose tu­mors ex­pressed PD-L1 (as quan­ti­fied by a com­bined pos­i­tive score, or CPS, of 10 or above).

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