My wife has Stage 2(B?) triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). Her treatment regiment includes Keytruda (pembrolizumab) once every 21 days. There was a full trial she was told about that is exploring using pembrolizumab entirely without chemo for TNBC. It's incredible that we might soon have at least one cancer that we might not need chemo to treat.
People are now taking TKI inhibitors as first line treatments. It doesn't really cure you, but given long term stable disease, you could end up with late stage cancer patients who don't need chemo for years.
TKIs are for very rare lung cancers but they're quite effective for late stage cancer patients whom have the right type of tumor mutations.
There are a few de-escalation trials where patients with high amount of lymphocytes in tumor associated stroma don't need to get chemo, even for stage 2 and 3 TNBC
