MERCK announced that the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use of the European Medicines Agency adopted a positive opinion recommending approval of Keytruda (pembrolizumab) for the first-line treatment of metastatic non-small cell lung cancer in adults whose tumors have high PD-L1 expression (tumor proportion score [TPS] of 50 percent or more) with no EGFR or ALK positive tumor mutations.
How’s this for a paradox: The better cancer centers become at keeping patients alive, the more expensive cancer care becomes. This brutal tradeoff hits harder in rural areas, where the cancer burden is higher and the investigator and clinical trial representation is lower.
