Bristol-Myers Cancer Combo Has Tepid Result Against Chemotherapy

(Bloomberg) -- Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.’s blockbuster oncology drug showed tepid results in a trial of lung-cancer patients, in what investors may read as a setback in the competitive market drugs that unleash the immune system to attack tumors.

The trial compared chemotherapy treatment against a cocktail of Bristol-Myers’s Opdivo and a low dose of its drug Yervoy. Patients who got the new, expensive drugs lived an average of 17.1 months, compared with 14.9 months on chemotherapy.

Bristol-Myers’ chief rival in the market for so-called immunotherapy drugs is Merck & Co. Merck’s immunotherapy drug Keytruda has been the winner in the lung-cancer market and is on pace to become a $10-billion-a-year product. Lung cancer is the deadliest tumor type, killing 154,000 Americans each year.

“Keytruda has set a high enough bar that it will be challenging” for Bristol-Myers’ combination therapy to compete in the non-small cell lung setting, said Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Louise Chen in a note to investors on Monday before the Opdivo-Yervoy data released.

Bristol-Myers’ head of oncology development Fouad Namouni said the Opdivo-Yervoy combination reflects the first dual therapy to demonstrate “superior overall survival over chemotherapy” in non-small cell lung cancer. But patients in the trial who got Bristol-Myers’ drugs only lived about two months longer than those who got chemotherapy. The results are being presented at European Society for Medical Oncology Congress in Barcelona on Saturday.

The company is also presenting positive data at the meeting on the use of Opdivo and Yervoy in patients with advanced melanoma, the first tumor type the drugs were approved to treat. After five years, 52% of advanced melanoma patients given both drugs were still alive, compared with 44% treated with Opdivo alone and 26% on Yervoy only.

Bristol-Myers suffered a setback in July when a combination of Opdivo and chemotherapy didn’t extend the lives of patients with non-small cell lung cancer in a statistically significant way over chemotherapy on its own. Chief Executive Officer Giovanni Caforio has said that Opdivo will face pressure in 2020 in light of recent trial results and increasing competition.

In January, Bristol-Myers announced a $74 billion deal with Celgene Corp., an effort to expand its on-the-market products and grow its pipeline.

To contact the reporter on this story: Riley Griffin in New York at rgriffin42@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Drew Armstrong at darmstrong17@bloomberg.net, Timothy Annett

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