Recent research led by University of Colorado Cancer Center member Bryan Haugen, MD, may provide new treatment options for patients with thyroid cancer that doesn’t respond to radioactive iodine treatment.
Published in September in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, the results of the 18-month trial show that adding the checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab, an immunotherapy drug, to the standard-of-care drug lenvatinib — a multikinase inhibitor that blocks the blood supply to tumors — helped patients go longer without a relapse.
We spoke with Haugen, who led the six-center trial, about the research and its results.