Novartis’ Kisqali Cuts Death Risk 19% in Breast Cancer Study
(Bloomberg) — Novartis AG’s breast cancer pill Kisqali helped patients with a common form of early-stage disease live longer, bolstering the case for its use before cancer returns.
Adding Kisqali to standard hormone therapy reduced the risk of death by about 19% after six years, according to the study’s lead author Dennis Slamon, professor of medicine and chief of Hematology-Oncology at UCLA. He will present the results Friday at the European Society for Medical Oncology meeting in Madrid.
The benefit continued to grow even though patients had been off Kisqali for more than three years on average, while the drug also reduced the risk of the cancer returning.
Kisqali is already approved to treat these patients after their tumors have been removed, when the goal is to stop the cancer from coming back. Showing that the drug also helps patients live longer is important because this type of breast cancer can return many years after initial treatment.
“I think it will change how physicians think about it,” Slamon said in an interview. “This increasing benefit that we’ve seen now over time — both for survival and for the recurrence rate — is a manifestation of the fact that the drug’s going to have a long-term effect.”
At six years, 91.9% of patients who received Kisqali were alive, the NATALEE study shows, compared with 89.7% of those given hormone therapy alone. The gap widened from 1.2 percentage points a year earlier, while the difference in the share of patients who remained free of invasive disease grew to 5.3 points from 4.1 points.
The survival advantage may have been larger had fewer patients in the control group later received Kisqali or another drug from the same class, Slamon said. That would have “biased against seeing the difference we’ve seen,” he said.
One question is how broadly doctors will use Kisqali among patients whose cancer is caught relatively early and who face a lower risk of recurrence. The study included some of those patients, including women whose cancer hadn’t spread to the lymph nodes, and Slamon said the results showed they benefited as well.
“The inclusivity of the trial has told us the drug can benefit a large swath of that important group of patients,” he said.
©2026 Bloomberg L.P.
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