Bris­tol-My­ers de­tails its fail­ure on Check­mate 451, high­light­ing a bleak fu­ture for their check­point com­bo

We found out last fall that Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb’s com­bi­na­tion of its PD-1/CT­LA-4 drugs Op­di­vo and Yer­voy failed to work as a main­te­nance ther­a­py for small cell lung can­cer. To­day, we got the de­tails. And it wasn’t pret­ty.

Re­searchers en­rolled 834 pa­tients in Check­mate 451 to see if de­liv­er­ing the com­bo af­ter suc­cess­ful chemo would help pre­vent the can­cer from com­ing back.

It didn’t.

As we saw from a blast of tweets from on­col­o­gists at the Eu­ro­pean Lung Can­cer Con­gress, the over­all sur­vival rate for the pa­tients in the com­bo arm was 9.2 months, com­pared to a slight­ly longer 9.6 months for the place­bo group.

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