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FLOT plus Trastuzumab Immunotherapy
My husband was diagnosed with esophageal cancer about 7 weeks ago. It is locally advanced but not metastasized elsewhere. He is diagnosed as potentially curable. He has started FLOT chemo treatment. Last week we learned his biopsy was HER2 Fish positive and the PD-L1 Combined Positive Score (CPS) was 15 indicating he qualifies for immunotherapy. The pathology report recommended KEYTRUDA (pembrolizumab) but we recently found my husband's oncologist has ordered Trastuzumab Immunotherapy to start in about 3 weeks. We will reach out to the oncologist but wondered if anyone has had experience with either of these immunotherapies for esophageal cancel and has any feedback you could offer. Thank you.
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My husband gets a Keytruda treatment every 3 weeks. He is doing well with it. It is extremely expensive but there is a program that helps pay for it, thank goodness. Not all hospitals accept the program so he does his chemo treatment every 2 weeks and one hospital and the Keytruda at the other local hospital. So when they fall on the same day he has to go both places.
Thank you and so glad your husband is doing well with it. Our hospital does use both Keytruda and Trastuzumab but in my husbands case they have ordered the later, maybe because his cancer is locally advanced but not metastasized elsewhere yet. Those will be good questions for us to discuss with our oncologist. Best of luch to you & your husband, this is difficult & scary business.
Good luck to you, I hope all goes well. It's just one day at a time.
@bjromsek, how is your husband doing with chemo and immunotherapy? How are you doing?
Hi Colleen,
Thank you for the note. We had to take a 5 week pause in treatments as my husband has only been able to get in a fraction of needed nutrition. An enteral feeding tube was placed last Thursday and that has gone extremely well and now he is achieving nutritional targets every day. He will resume treatments next Thursday and that will be his 2nd FLOT chemo treatment and his 1st treatment with the Trastuzumab immunotherapy. I find very little information on Trastuzumab being used with esophageal cancer which was the reason for my original post. Was hoping someone in this wide network could share some insight or experience but there doesn't seem to be any. Again, thanks!
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