Mo­ment of truth looms for Nek­tar, Bris­tol-My­ers with a ma­jor up­date to NK­TR-214 com­bo — and the lat­est snap­shot is not promis­ing

Just 8 months af­ter Bris­tol-My­ers paid Nek­tar $1.85 bil­lion in cash up­front to al­ly them­selves on NK­TR-214, an IL-2 drug that us­es pe­gy­la­tion tech to try to over­come the se­vere lim­i­ta­tions that ham­per the first-gen ap­proach­es, re­searchers are sched­uled to add on a sig­nif­i­cant up­date to their proof-of-con­cept Phase I/II study.

On Tues­day, in­ves­ti­ga­tors got a peek at some new num­bers when Nek­tar filed a short-term, 6-week up­date in an ab­stract for SITC adding 10 pa­tients to the mix re­ceiv­ing a com­bi­na­tion of Op­di­vo and NK­TR-214 for first-line melanoma. They count­ed an ex­tra 5 ob­jec­tive re­spons­es among the 38 — which keeps the ORR re­sponse rate right at half.

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