Investigators presented results of the phase 3 IMpassion130 earlier this year demonstrating, for the first time, that a combination of an immune checkpoint inhibitor and a taxane provided significant clinical benefit to patients with advanced triple-negative breast cancer. However, the benefit was seen only in patients positive for programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1), the investigators reported at the annual congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology.
In the trial, 902 patients with untreated metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (mTNBC) were randomly assigned to receive the PD-L1 inhibitor atezolizumab (Tecentriq) plus nanoparticle albumin-bound (nab)–paclitaxel or placebo plus nab-paclitaxel. In an interim analysis, although there was no significant difference in median overall survival among all participants, atezolizumab was associated with a 38% improvement in median overall survival among patients with PD-L1–positive disease.
Additional analyses of the efficacy within immune biomarker subgroups in IMpassion130, including efficacy by BRCA status, will be presented at the upcoming 2018 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, to be held Dec. 4-8 in San Antonio.
Leisha A. Emens, MD, PhD, professor of medicine in hematology/oncology, co-leader of the Hillman Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy Program, and director of translational immunotherapy for the Women’s Cancer Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, will present the additional analyses on Wednesday, Dec. 5th at 9:30 a.m. CST.