Patients Lived Longer on a New Lung Cancer Drug Than on the Standard One, Its Maker Says

Akeso has disclosed the survival figures behind a lung cancer result it announced without them. At the 2026 World Conference on Lung Cancer, the company reported that patients given its drug ivonescimab lived a median of 30.8 months, against 22.6 months for patients given pembrolizumab. A median is the point at which half of a group has died.

Ivonescimab is an antibody built to block two targets at once, and HARMONi-2 tested it as the first drug given to people with advanced non-small cell lung cancer whose tumors carry the PD-L1 marker. Pembrolizumab is what those patients usually receive first. We reported that announcement on September 4, when the company said the trial had met its survival endpoint and gave no numbers; these are the numbers.

The release gives a data cutoff of August 20, 2026, and describes the analysis as a planned interim look rather than the final one. Akeso says the difference cleared the significance threshold set for the trial in advance. The figures are the company's own account of a trial it funded, and they have not been peer reviewed or published as a paper. Caicun Zhou of Shanghai East Hospital, the trial's principal investigator, is due to present the full results on September 15.

HARMONi-2 randomly assigned 398 patients at hospitals in China, according to the trial's earlier report in The Lancet, which covered its first result: ivonescimab held the disease in check longer than pembrolizumab did. China approved the drug for that use in 2025, Akeso said.

A larger international trial of the same comparison, HARMONi-7, is under way, the company said.