ESMO 2017 | When should treatment be stopped?

Caroline Robert , MD, PhD, from the Gustave Roussy Cancer Institute, Villejuif, France, discusses when to stop treatment at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2017 in Madrid, Spain. In recent years, there has been a shift in terms of when treatment is stopped. Until now, treatment stopped if the disease was progressing, or if it became no longer tolerable, however, treatment is now typically stopped when there is no longer a benefit. The KEYNOTE-001 trial (NCT01295827) investigated the use of pembrolizumab in melanoma, and found that for a significant proportion of patients, treatment stopped because of a complete response, and the majority of them are still free of progression after a four-year follow up.