Aspirin to be trialled as part of new treatment for triple negative breast cancer

A new clinical trial is investigating if giving aspirin alongside immunotherapy drug Avelumab could improve its effectiveness for patients with triple negative breast cancer (TNBC).

TNBC is a less common but often more aggressive type of breast cancer that disproportionately affects younger women and black women, with 8,000 women being diagnosed in the UK each year.

As part of the programme, Pfizer has provided an independent medical research grant to Breast Cancer Now.

The trial follows prior research demonstrating that, in mice, pairing an immunotherapy drug like avelumab with aspirin helps to control tumour growth more successfully than immunotherapy drugs alone.

A recent analysis of existing published studies by Cardiff University concluded that in patients with 18 different cancers, about 20% more of the patients who took aspirin for other health reasons were likely to be alive compared with those patients not taking aspirin.

The trial will be the first to test if aspirin can make tumours more sensitive to immunotherapy in TNBC patients.

Anne Armstrong, consultant medical oncologist and honorary senior lecturer at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust in Manchester, who is leading the trial, said: “Trialling the use of a drug like aspirin is exciting because it is so widely available and inexpensive to produce. We hope our trial will show that, when combined with immunotherapy, aspirin can enhance its effects and may ultimately provide a safe new way to treat breast cancer.”

Earlier this year, Merck & Co immunotherapy treatment Keytruda (pembrolizumab) demonstrated significant and meaningful improvement in its phase 3 trial, meeting its end-point of event-free survival (EFS) for the treatment of high-risk early-stage TNBC patients.

In the EU the European Medicines Agency began an accelerated review of Gilead’s Trodelvy for the treatment of advanced TNBC in April.