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Combining Eribulin and Pembrolizumab in Metastatic Triple-Negative Breast Cancer

On their own, eribulin and pembrolizumab have proven to be effective treatment options for patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. Following the lead of recent data showing that the addition of immunotherapy to chemotherapy can improve treatment, a recent study looked at the safety and efficacy of combining the two treatments.  

Sara M. Tolaney, MD, MPH, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute told MD/Alert the researchers also expanded the study’s focus to look at the combination as not only a first-line therapy but also for later lines of treatment. 

The phase Ib/II trial enrolled a total of 167 patients, with 66 being treatment naïve and 101 having received at least one prior line of chemotherapy. 

Dr Tolaney said the progression-free survival of the first group was 4.2 months compared to 4.1 months in the second group. The overall survival in the first group was 17.4 months compared to 15.5 months in the second. 

“While this is a single-armed trial and there is no comparison to eribulin by itself in this study, if we did juxtapose these data with historical control for how eribulin performs or how pembrolizumab performs, certainly the survival data that we’re seeing is longer than we would have anticipated with either agent alone, suggesting that the combination is probably performing better than either agent alone,” Tolaney said.
 
The trial also studied the results of the patients enrolled based on their PDL-1 status. Tolaney said that previous trials have shown the benefits of checkpoint inhibition for patients with PDL-1 positive tumors. 

Those findings were reaffirmed in their trial, according to Dr Tolaney, who noted that the overall survival for patients with PDL-1 positive tumors in the treatment naïve arm was 21 months compared to 15 months for patients with PDL-1 negative tumors. 

Dr Tolaney said one interesting note when it came to PDL-1 status was that in the second group, overall survival was similar for both the PDL-1 positive and PDL-1 negative status at around 15 months. 


By Adam Hochron 

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