As­traZeneca wants a do-over on MYS­TIC com­bo da­ta. But a change­up in fo­cus won’t end the death watch on this pair­ing

As­traZeneca CEO Pas­cal So­ri­ot’s de­ci­sion to bet big on a check­point R&D strat­e­gy that re­lied heav­i­ly on its in-house com­bo of PD-L1 and CT­LA-4 is start­ing to look like a block­buster los­er. And this week’s push­back on a sub­set of the da­ta re­lat­ed to high tu­mor mu­ta­tion bur­den will like­ly do very lit­tle to change the odds here.

Re­searchers for the phar­ma gi­ant $AZN turned up at the Eu­ro­pean So­ci­ety for Med­ical On­col­o­gy Im­muno-On­col­o­gy 2018 Con­gress in Gene­va this week with more stun­ning­ly poor da­ta for the com­bi­na­tion of Imfinzi and treme­li­mum­ab, which was out­per­formed by Imfinzi alone — though the monother­a­py al­so failed to stand out in ad­vanced cas­es of non-small cell lung can­cer.

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