Nek­tar wants every­one to stay calm as they car­ry on with NK­TR-214, but #AS­CO18 spurs a stam­pede

CHICA­GO — Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb $BMY has gone all in on Nek­tar’s $NK­TR ap­proach to amp­ing up their check­point strat­e­gy, part­ner­ing on NK­TR-214. But in­stead of tak­ing a bow at #AS­CO18 on pos­i­tive da­ta, re­searchers spent the week­end ex­plain­ing why their lat­est da­ta read­out from a small study shouldn’t be cause for pan­ic.

It’s not what they were look­ing for, to put it mild­ly.

Un­like most of the more close­ly-watched pro­grams here at AS­CO, the re­searchers in­volved nev­er of­fered a pre­view of the da­ta that came out Sat­ur­day evening. And that was a se­ri­ous mis­step, par­tic­u­lar­ly as the re­porters cov­er­ing this ses­sion strug­gled to fig­ure out what was be­ing re­port­ed — and what it meant.

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