Aveo teams with Bris­tol My­ers af­ter sur­prise FDA ap­proval; Cal­ciMed­ica lines up $21M raise to ad­vance Covid-19 can­di­date

Aveo On­col­o­gy’s new­ly ap­proved drug doesn’t ex­tend lives, but hey, maybe it will when com­bined with Op­di­vo?

Aveo an­nounced Fri­day that it was launch­ing a tri­al to test tivozanib with Bris­tol My­ers Squibb’s check­point ther­a­py in re­nal cell car­ci­no­ma in a Phase III tri­al, bet­ting that com­bin­ing the ki­nase in­hibitor and an im­munother­a­py could lead to a bet­ter out­come for pa­tients.

The an­nounce­ment comes two days af­ter the FDA ap­proved the drug for the same in­di­ca­tion. It was a sur­prise, com­ing 9 years af­ter the com­pa­ny first filed for ap­proval, and af­ter a piv­otal tri­al showed pa­tients who got the place­bo lived 3 months longer than pa­tients who got the drug. (Aveo, de­fend­ing the drug, has said the haz­ard ra­tio for death is 0.97 and point­ed to the pro­gres­sion-free sur­vival fig­ures for pa­tients who got the drug.)

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