John Kuruvilla, MD, on the Implications of the Phase III KEYNOTE-204 Study

Results from the randomized, open-label phase III KEYNOTE-204 study, presented at the 2020 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Virtual Scientific Program, suggested that pembrolizumab (Keytruda) was superior to brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris) in patients with relapsed or refractory classic Hodgkin lymphoma (R/R cHL).

In an interview with CancerNetwork®, John Kuruvilla, MD, of the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, discussed the implications of the phase III KEYNOTE-204 trial and what these findings represent for this patient population. 

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It's been an interesting study to think about because the population is actually both broad and focused in a way, so the real standard in this setting for a long time had been brentuximab vedotin, and that was based on the pivotal trial that had enrolled patients that had had disease progression only following autologous stem cell transplants. And so, clinicians where possible had generalized that data to also include patients that had been ineligible for transplant due to age or comorbidity or the presence of refractory disease. And so, brentuximab was well established in that population. What these data show is in the place where brentuximab had been defined by its pivotal clinical trial, pembrolizumab has more favorable progression-free survival. And similarly, in that population that had not been in the pivotal brentuximab study, but brentuximab had become the standard up until now, pembrolizumab also had superiority in those non-transplanted patients as well.