On a roll, Mer­ck blazes through a new seg­ment of the bio­mark­er trail

Mer­ck has notched an ap­proval for us­ing Keytru­da to treat a bio­mark­er-based sub­set of first-line col­orec­tal can­cer pa­tients with un­re­sectable or metasta­t­ic tu­mors, as the phar­ma gi­ant con­tin­ues to find new nich­es for its block­buster PD-1 star.

The OK is sig­nif­i­cant in a num­ber of ways. Not on­ly does it build on an ac­cel­er­at­ed ap­proval for all tu­mors char­ac­ter­ized as mi­crosatel­lite in­sta­bil­i­ty-high (MSI-H) or mis­match re­pair de­fi­cient (dMMR); it al­so marks the first sin­gle treat­ment for col­orec­tal can­cer that doesn’t con­tain chemother­a­py.

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