A major study by Eli Lilly has found that patients with early-stage breast cancer who took Verzenio along with standard hormone therapy lived longer than those who only took hormone therapy. The study, called monarchE, included over 5,600 adults with high-risk breast cancer that responds to hormones but lacks a protein called HER2. Lilly reported that the improvement in survival was both statistically significant and meaningful for patients. Earlier results from this study had already shown that Verzenio helps prevent cancer from returning, leading to its approval in 2021 for this use. The latest findings on survival will be shared at an upcoming medical conference. Verzenio is part of a group of cancer drugs known as CDK4/6 inhibitors. Since its approval in 2017, it has become one of Lilly’s top-selling drugs, with $5.3 billion in sales last year. While it was initially approved for advanced breast cancer, the monarchE study expanded its use to the most common type of early breast cancer—HR+, HER2- tumors. Lilly’s head of oncology, Jacob van Naarden, said these results confirm Verzenio as a standard treatment for high-risk patients. The safety data from the long-term study matched earlier findings, and Lilly plans to publish the results in a medical journal and share them with regulators. Other companies, like Pfizer and Novartis, also sell similar drugs, but Novartis’s Kisqali has shown strong results in reducing cancer recurrence in early-stage patients. However, Novartis’s study included patients whose cancer hadn’t spread to the lymph nodes, while Lilly’s study focused on those whose cancer had.