Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb has suf­fered an­oth­er painful set­back in its years-long quest to ex­pand the reach of Op­di­vo. The phar­ma gi­ant this morn­ing not­ed that their Check­mate-459 study com­par­ing Op­di­vo with Bay­er’s Nex­avar in front­line cas­es of he­pa­to­cel­lu­lar car­ci­no­ma — the most com­mon form of liv­er can­cer — failed to hit the pri­ma­ry end­point on over­all sur­vival.

This was a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone in Bris­tol-My­ers’ tal­ly of PD-1 cat­a­lysts this year. Nex­avar (so­rafenib) has been the stan­dard of care in front­line HCC for the past decade, though Op­di­vo has been mak­ing head­way in sec­ond-line HCC cas­es, where it’s go­ing toe-to-toe with Bay­er’s Sti­var­ga (re­go­rafenib) af­ter re­cent ap­provals shook up the mar­ket.

The OS rate on Op­di­vo fell well short of sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance, with a p val­ue of 0.0752. We’ll have to wait for an up­com­ing sci­ence con­fer­ence to get the full pic­ture.

Bris­tol-My­ers shares $BMY were down 4.5% ahead of the open­ing bell Mon­day as in­vestors re­act­ed to the news that the com­pa­ny is sell­ing Ote­zla to sat­is­fy reg­u­la­tors ahead of its big Cel­gene buy­out.

Re­searchers looked for a sil­ver lin­ing in the lat­est cut of the da­ta onOp­di­vo, say­ing “the re­sults showed a clear trend to­wards im­prove­ment in OS for pa­tients treat­ed with Op­di­vo com­pared to so­rafenib (Nex­avar), a cur­rent stan­dard of care.”

Bruno San­gro Clíni­ca Uni­ver­si­dad de Navar­ra

“We are en­cour­aged by the promis­ing ef­fi­ca­cy and safe­ty trends seen with Op­di­vo in Check­Mate-459, es­pe­cial­ly as HCC is a dev­as­tat­ing and dif­fi­cult-to-treat can­cer, for which there have been no sig­nif­i­cant ad­vances over so­rafenib, a stan­dard treat­ment, in more than a decade,” said Bruno San­gro, head of the liv­er unit, Clíni­ca Uni­ver­si­dad de Navar­ra, Pam­plona, Spain.

But an­a­lysts saw the down­side clear­ly. Vamil Di­van from Cred­it­Su­isse not­ed: “While the tri­al showed a trend to­wards an over­all sur­vival ben­e­fit, the lack of sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance opens the door for com­peti­tors such as Mer­ck, Roche and As­tra to be­come the dom­i­nant play­er(s) in this in­di­ca­tion with the var­i­ous com­bi­na­tion tri­als they are cur­rent­ly run­ning.”

Michael Schmidt at SVB Leerink re­cent­ly not­ed:

In the US, Op­di­vo is gain­ing rapid mar­ket share in 2nd line HCC dri­ven by an ag­gres­sive mar­ket­ing ef­fort by BMY and mas­sive free sam­pling with some off-la­bel use not­ed in front-line pa­tients which is sup­port­ed by strong CM-040 re­sults. In Eu­rope, re­go­rafenib is ex­pect­ed to re­main the pre­ferred 2nd line agent in the near term, giv­en dif­fer­ences in treat­ment pat­tern and pref­er­ences.

Bris­tol-My­ers is by no means fin­ished here, with more re­sults ex­pect­ed on their com­bo with the CT­LA-4 Yer­voy. That match-up, though, has al­ready failed in small cell lung can­cer while in­ves­ti­ga­tors have had to deal with a strong push­back from the FDA in their quest to use high tu­mor mu­ta­tion­al bur­den de­f­i­n­i­tions to de­fine a new ap­proach to iden­ti­fy­ing lung can­cer pa­tients most like­ly to re­spond to Op­di­vo.

Mer­ck, mean­while, has fa­mous­ly pressed ahead in its suc­cess­ful dri­ve to gain the lead po­si­tion in the race to com­mand the PD-1 field. Both Keytru­da and Op­di­vo, though, are ex­pect­ed to re­main the two dom­i­nant drugs in their field for some time.

Sanofi expects its RSV antibody jointly developed with AstraZeneca will be available next season, executive VP of vaccines Thomas Triomphe announced on the company’s quarterly call.

Beyfortus, also known as nirsevimab, was approved in the EU back in November and is currently under FDA review with an expected decision coming in the third quarter of this year. The news comes as the FDA plans to hold advisory committee meetings over the next couple months to review RSV vaccines from Pfizer and GSK.

After a whopping $4 billion asset buy from Nimbus Therapeutics, along with a $400 million deal with Hutchmed for a colorectal cancer drug, Takeda executives touted pipeline optimism on its latest earnings call this week.

That’s because the TYK2 inhibitor for psoriasis Takeda is getting from Nimbus, along with the Hutchmed fruquintinib commercialization outside of China, are just two of what it reports are 10 late-stage development programs of promising candidates.

Regeneron faced a substantial slump in overall revenue last year, but the focus still remains on some of its biggest blockbusters.

The pharma with several high-profile partnerships — Sanofi and Bayer among them — said Friday that Q4 revenue was down 31% for the quarter, and down 24% for the entire year. However, that won’t stop blockbuster expansion plans.

One of those is Eylea, the Bayer-partnered eye disease drug that has been in major competition with Roche’s Vabysmo. While Eylea is currently only approved in a 2 mg dose, the company recently filed for approval to give a 8 mg dose, in hopes of making a longer-lasting treatment.