Giving the immunotherapy Opdivo to lung cancer patients before surgery can help prevent the disease from coming back, a new study says. The FDA approved Opdivo for this use on March 4, and yesterday the data behind that decision were presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Patients in the study who received three courses of Opdivo in combination with chemotherapy were 37% less likely to have progression of disease that prevented surgery, any progression of disease after surgery, or death. In patients receiving Opdivo and chemotherapy, the median time to one of these negative events was 31.6 months, compared to 20.8 months for patients treated with chemotherapy alone.