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Mer­ck has once again failed to boost the ef­fects of its PD-1 block­buster Keytru­da by adding As­traZeneca’s PARP in­hibitor Lyn­parza.

When giv­en as a main­te­nance ther­a­py, Lyn­parza and Keytru­da did not re­sult in sur­vival ben­e­fits for cer­tain first-line non­squa­mous non-small cell lung can­cer (NSCLC) pa­tients com­pared to Keytru­da and peme­trexed, a type of chemother­a­py. The com­bo al­so failed to meet its sec­ond pri­ma­ry end­point, pro­gres­sion-free sur­vival, Mer­ck an­nounced Thurs­day.

This marks the lat­est in a string of fail­ures for Keytru­da and Lyn­parza, in­clud­ing a study in squa­mous NSCLC that was stopped in De­cem­ber when in­ter­im analy­ses failed to show mean­ing­ful im­prove­ments in over­all and pro­gres­sion-free sur­vival. An­oth­er com­bo study was stopped in March 2022 in metasta­t­ic cas­tra­tion-re­sis­tant prostate can­cer (mCR­PC) af­ter al­so fail­ing to show ben­e­fits in OS and PFS.

Mer­ck said Thurs­day that it’s con­duct­ing a “full eval­u­a­tion” of the study. The com­pa­ny re­port­ed safe­ty re­sults con­sis­tent with pri­or stud­ies for the in­di­vid­ual ther­a­pies. As of press time, Mer­ck did not re­spond to ques­tions about whether it will con­tin­ue to pur­sue a com­bi­na­tion ap­proach in NSCLC.

“As lung can­cer con­tin­ues to be the lead­ing cause of can­cer death world­wide, we are com­mit­ted to ex­plor­ing KEYTRU­DA-based com­bi­na­tions and nov­el can­di­dates that may fur­ther help im­prove pa­tient out­comes,” Mer­ck Re­search Lab­o­ra­to­ries VP of Glob­al Clin­i­cal De­vel­op­ment Gre­go­ry Lu­biniec­ki said in a news re­lease.

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