诺华的乳腺癌药物 Kisqali 帮助患有一种常见早期乳腺癌的患者延长了生存期，增强了在癌症复发前使用该药的理由。
AG’s breast cancer pill Kisqali helped patients with a common form of early-stage disease live longer, bolstering the case for its use before cancer returns.
该研究的主要作者、加州大学洛杉矶分校医学教授、血液肿瘤学主任 Dennis Slamon 表示，根据研究结果，在标准激素疗法基础上加用 Kisqali，六年后将死亡风险降低了约 19%。他将于周五在马德里举行的欧洲肿瘤内科学会会议上公布这些结果。
Adding Kisqali to standard hormone therapy reduced the risk of death by about 19% after six years, according to the study’s lead author Dennis Slamon, professor of medicine and chief of Hematology-Oncology at UCLA. He will present the results Friday at the European Society for Medical Oncology meeting in Madrid.
尽管患者平均已停用 Kisqali 超过三年，但获益仍在持续增加，同时该药也降低了癌症复发的风险。
The benefit continued to grow even though patients had been off Kisqali for more than three years on average, while the drug also reduced the risk of the cancer returning.
Kisqali 已获批用于肿瘤切除后的此类患者治疗，目标是防止癌症复发。证明该药还能帮助患者延长生存期很重要，因为这种类型的乳腺癌可能在初次治疗多年后复发。
Kisqali is already approved to treat these patients after their tumors have been removed, when the goal is to stop the cancer from coming back. Showing that the drug also helps patients live longer is important because this type of breast cancer can return many years after initial treatment.
Slamon 在接受采访时表示：“我认为这将改变医生对它的看法。我们现在看到的随着时间推移而不断增加的获益——无论是生存率还是复发率方面——都表明该药物将产生长期效果。” NATALEE 研究显示，六年时，接受 Kisqali 治疗的患者中有 91.9% 存活，而单纯接受激素疗法的患者为 89.7%。这一差距较一年前的 1.2 个百分点有所扩大，而保持无侵袭性疾病的患者比例差距则从 4.1 个百分点扩大至 5.3 个百分点。
“I think it will change how physicians think about it,” Slamon said in an interview. “This increasing benefit that we’ve seen now over time — both for survival and for the recurrence rate — is a manifestation of the fact that the drug’s going to have a long-term effect.”At six years, 91.9% of patients who received Kisqali were alive, the NATALEE study shows, compared with 89.7% of those given hormone therapy alone. The gap widened from 1.2 percentage points a year earlier, while the difference in the share of patients who remained free of invasive disease grew to 5.3 points from 4.1 points.
Slamon 表示，如果对照组后来接受 Kisqali 或同类药物的患者更少，生存优势可能会更大。他说，那将“会使我们所看到的差异产生不利偏倚”。
The survival advantage may have been larger had fewer patients in the control group later received Kisqali or another drug from the same class, Slamon said. That would have “biased against seeing the difference we’ve seen,” he said.
一个问题是，医生将在多大程度上为癌症发现相对较早、复发风险较低的患者使用 Kisqali。该研究纳入了部分此类患者，包括癌症未扩散至淋巴结的女性，斯拉蒙表示，结果显示她们同样受益。
One question is how broadly doctors will use Kisqali among patients whose cancer is caught relatively early and who face a lower risk of recurrence. The study included some of those patients, including women whose cancer hadn’t spread to the lymph nodes, and Slamon said the results showed they benefited as well.
他说：“试验的包容性告诉我们，这种药物能惠及这一重要患者群体中的广大群体。”
“The inclusivity of the trial has told us the drug can benefit a large swath of that important group of patients,” he said.