Immunotherapy Drugs in the Pipeline for Breast Cancer Treatment

Rita Nanda, MD, discusses various immunotherapy drugs in the pipeline and which she thinks will be approved next. This video was filmed December 11 at the 2019 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.


Rita Nanda, MD: So there are a number of different immunotherapy drugs that are in development. Pembrolizumab, we’re still waiting for the first-line metastatic triple-negative trial to report out the KEYNOTE-355 trial. That was a randomized Phase 3 trial where patients were randomized to chemotherapy with or without pembrolizumab. There were 3 different chemotherapy backbones that were studied: They are nab-paclitaxel, paclitaxel, or carboplatin plus gemcitabine. So if that trial is a positive trial, then pembrolizumab could maybe be coming out into the clinical arena.

We also have data from the neoadjuvant setting, the KEYNOTE-522 trial, which has looked at pembrolizumab in conjunction with neoadjuvant chemotherapy, and that trial is a positive trial. So it could very well be that pembrolizumab will actually be approved in the early-stage setting for patients with triple-negative breast cancer. So I think pembrolizumab is likely to be the next immune agent that will be approved for breast cancer, but there are a number of other immunotherapy drugs—durvalumab, nivolumab, avelumab—that are being investigated, but probably are not as far along in development.