Kinjal Shankar Majumdar, Medical Consultant at Apollo Hospitals, shared a post by Ophira Ginsburg, Provost’s Visiting Professor of Global Cancer Equity at Imperial College London, adding:
“When India makes world listen to its success story. Made by India for the world.”
Ophira Ginsburg shared a post by Berna Özdemir, Senior Physician at Insel Gruppe, adding:
“Hear hear!
Why aren’t more people talking about this?
Yet more evidence for the potential of low dose immunotherapy to treat a common cancer – that affects hundreds of thousands of people in lower resource settings.
Congratulations indeed to our colleagues in India for continuing to show us how it’s done.”
Quoting Berna Özdemir‘s post:
“As ASCO has come to an end, I found the poppy in the corn field:
One study that received much less attention than many of the other trials was a randomized phase 3 trial from India evaluating low-dose pembrolizumab in advanced lung cancer (NSCLC) (Menon NS et al. LBA1510)
380 patients were randomized to chemotherapy alone or chemotherapy plus pembrolizumab at just 50 mg for four cycles, followed by 50 mg every 6 weeks. (–> 12.5% of the currently approved dose!)
The study met its primary endpoint, improving overall survival with a hazard ratio of 0.71 which is comparable to the results of other immunotherapy trials in NSCLC (in spite of 40% of participants having ECOG 2).
These results confirm what we know since 2010: > 70% of PD-1 receptors on circulating T cells remain occupied for at least 2 months after a immmunotherapy infusion, independent of the dose (0.3, 1, 3, or 10 mg/kg)
and there is no dose reponse relationship for response, PFS or OS.
ASCO presented a lot of exciting data this year. But progress that remains out of reach for most patients around the world is difficult to celebrate.
For me trials that investigate how we can deliver effective cancer care in low resource settings deserve as much attention as studies that make it to the headlines.
Congrats to the Indian Oncology Community for this great effort.”
