The research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, also showed that the combined treatment reduced the risk of death or the progressing of triple-negative breast cancer by up to 40 per cent

A treatment regime combining immunotherapy and chemotherapy can help tune the body's immune system to attack an aggressive type of breast cancer, extending survival by up to 10 months, show results of an immunotherapy trial in Britain. Prof Schmid, who is clinical director of the Breast Cancer Centre at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, explained that he new treatment will “significantly extend lives compared to the standard treatment of chemotherapy alone.”

“We are changing how triple-negative breast cancer is treated in proving for the first time that immune therapy has a substantial survival benefit,” he said. Women diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer, who make up 15% to 20% of breast cancer patients, often try chemotherapy after chemotherapy, working through each drug until their cancer starts growing again, at which point they move on to the next drug. “We are using chemotherapy to tear away the tumor’s ‘immune-protective cloak,’ to expose it,” Schmid said, “enabling people’s own immune system to get at it.”

The Phase three study followed more than 900 women enrolled at 246 sites in 41 countries, who were randomly assigned to receive atezolizumab and chemo, or a placebo and chemo. In the study, the researchers randomly assigned patients with untreated triple-negative breast cancer to receive atezolizumab plus chemotherapy medication nab-paclitaxel or placebo plus nab-paclitaxel. The trial, at hundreds of sites in 41 countries, followed 902 patients and found the combination of immunotherapy and chemotherapy improved overall survival by nearly four months, (3.7 months) and nearly 10 months for those patients whose tumors tested positive for the targeted protein. “We have desperately been looking for better treatment options.”

When breast cancer cells test negative for estrogen, progesterone, or human epidermal growth factor 2 (HER2), it’s called a triple-negative breast cancer.
A research study published in The New England Journal of Medicine describes a significant mortality response to the immunotherapy Atezolizumab used in conjunction with the chemotherapy nab-paclitaxel for a type of untreatable Breast cancer (Triple-negative) when the tumors also display programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression.