FDA Grants Priority Review To SBLA For Merck's KEYTRUDA

(RTTNews) - Merck (MRK),announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted for review the supplemental Biologics License Application (sBLA) for KEYTRUDA® (pembrolizumab), the company's anti-PD-1 therapy, for the treatment of patients with refractory classical Hodgkin lymphoma (cHL) or for patients who have relapsed after three or more prior lines of therapy.

The FDA granted Priority Review with a PDUFA, or target action, date of March 15, 2017. The sBLA will be reviewed under the FDA's Accelerated Approval program. In April 2016, KEYTRUDA was granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation by the FDA for this indication.

The application is seeking approval for KEYTRUDA at a fixed dose of 200 mg administered intravenously every three weeks and is based on data from the KEYNOTE-087 and KEYNOTE-013 trials, which studied patients with refractory cHL or who had relapsed after three or more prior lines of therapy. This is the first application for regulatory approval of KEYTRUDA in a hematologic malignancy.

The KEYTRUDA clinical development program includes more than 30 tumor types in more than 360 clinical trials, including nearly 200 trials that combine KEYTRUDA with other cancer treatments. For hematologic malignancies specifically, Merck is conducting broad immuno-oncology research assessing the role of monotherapy and combination regimens with KEYTRUDA (pembrolizumab). The program includes nearly 40 ongoing studies - several of which are registration-enabling trials - across more than 20 hematologic subtypes, including leukemia, lymphomas and myeloma.