A few things happened this morning.
Merck's $6 Billion Win. When it comes to the battle for the cancer immunotherapy market, the optics can't get better for Merck. On May 1, the stock dropped because investors feared that a study of its Keytruda combined with chemotherapy in squamous non-small cell lung cancer had failed. (Study code name: KN-407.) On May 3, Merck then said that, actually, patients responded better to the combination of chemotherapy and Keytruda but that overall survival and progression-free survival ("PFS," whether tumors have grown) data were not ready. Today Merck announced that combining Keytruda with chemotherapy increased both overall survival and PFS in the study. Investors will still need to see the data and compare it with a rival combination from Roche, but the news is good. The U.S. lung opportunity is worth $6.6 billion for Merck; shares are up 1.6% to $59.37 in morning trading.
An Increment for Esperion. Esperion Therapeutics announced more data for its cholesterol drug, bempedoic acid, today. The data don't really change much. Investors became skittish with previous data in part because serious adverse events (that means "bad things that happen while on the drug") were more frequent in patients taking the drug, and there were three times as many deaths (still, just .9% of patients in the drug group.) The new data look better on all fronts, though there is still an imbalance in a pooled analysis of studies (now twice as many patients—.5%—die). The safety concerns may well be just statistical noise, but the worry is more about whether the Food & Drug Administration will ask for more data before approving the drug when Esperion files next year. Michael Yee at Jefferies writes in a note to investors that the analysis is an incremental positive but that he expects data due in September to give more clarity. Esperion shares are down 1.67%.
The Gilead Go-Round. Arie Belldegrun, who sold Kite Pharmaceuticals to Gilead for $11.9 billion last year, seems to like a lot of what Gilead used to have. This morning, Kronos Bio, a company based out of tech created at by Angela Koehler, a researcher at MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, raised $18 million, with Belldegrun's fund leading the round. It's chief executive? Norbert Bischofberger, who ran R&D at Gilead until April, when he left that company after 30 years. Another investor: billionaire John Martin, who was Gilead's chief executive and chairman for many years. Belldegrun's last big investment was a company that will compete with Kite to create cell therapies, run by his Kite head of R&D David Chang.
