(Reuters) – Lung cancer patients treated with AstraZeneca’s immunotherapy Imfinzi pre- and post-surgery in a trial lived significantly longer without the disease progressing or recurring than those treated with chemotherapy, the drugmaker said on Thursday.
The late-stage study compared patients with resectable, early-stage, non-small cell lung cancer who were treated with Imfinzi along with chemotherapy before surgery and as a monotherapy after surgery, to patients treated with chemotherapy pre-surgery.
Imfinzi was well tolerated and there were no new safety concerns before and after surgery, AstraZeneca said.
The drug had failed the main goal of a trial in patients with a form of late-stage lung cancer, Astrazeneca had said in December.
In that late-stage study, Imfinzi was tested as a monotherapy against platinum-based chemotherapy in non-small cell lung cancer patients whose tumour cells express high levels of PD-L1.
(Reporting by Yadarisa Shabong in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D’Souza)
