Combining an existing drug with chemotherapy can suppress an aggressive type of breast cancer’s resurgence, a study published Tuesday found. The study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that treating patients with both Keytruda, an immunotherapy drug, and chemotherapy prior to surgery reduced the chances of disease recurrence for early triple-negative breast cancer by 37 percent when compared with patients treated solely with chemotherapy. Lead researcher Peter Schmid, a professor at Queen Mary University of London, said, “The estimates are that, just in the US where this treatment was recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration, this new treatment may save as many as 10,000 lives per year.”
