AstraZeneca and Merck drugs set to shake up treatment of liver cancer

By Ashleigh Furlong 

Doctors may change how they treat liver cancer after drugs from AstraZeneca Plc and Merck & Co. helped some patients, marking the first treatment progress for them in decades. 

Two late-stage studies published Wednesday in The Lancet show that Astra’s Imfinzi and Merck’s Keytruda delayed the progress of liver cancer when combined with other drugs and a local treatment. 

 

Patients whose tumors can’t be treated with surgery lived several months longer without the disease advancing when treated with the Astra and Merck immunotherapies called checkpoint inhibitors.  

 

The data “represents a breakthrough after 20 years,” said Josep Llovet, director of Mount Sinai’s Liver Cancer Program and the co-lead researcher for the Keytruda study. The findings will likely pave the way for new treatment guidelines, he said, a viewpoint echoed by the scientists who carried out the Imfinzi trial and a separate article in the Lancet.  

 

 

The Keytruda study found that patients lived 14.6 months on average without the cancer progressing when they got the Merck drug, Eisai Co.’s Lenvima and a local therapy known transarterial chemoembolisation. The period was 10 months for the control group.

 

Chemoembolisation is a procedure that involves injecting chemotherapy drugs and an embolic agent into the tumor to cut off its blood supply. 

 

In the other study, patients who got the same procedure and took Astra’s Imfinzi as well as the Roche Holding AG drug Avastin took 15 months before their cancer got worse. That compares with 10 months for patients taking Imfinzi alone and 8.2 months for those who got a placebo.

 

Roughly a quarter of patients with liver cancer can’t be treated with surgery or other therapies that would completely remove the tumor, said Mount Sinai’s Llovet. 

 

The last major advance for those patients was in the early 2000s when several trials, including one that Llovet was involved in, showed that chemoembolisation helped patients.