No quick re­demp­tion for Glax­o­SmithK­line’s $4B al­liance with Mer­ck KGaA as bis­pe­cif­ic can­cer drug flunks a sec­ond tri­al

Glax­o­SmithK­line’s $4 bil­lion bis­pe­cif­ic can­cer drug al­liance is tak­ing an­oth­er hit.

Just weeks af­ter re­veal­ing a Phase III set­back in non-small cell lung can­cer, its part­ners at Mer­ck KGaA re­port­ed that bin­tra­fusp al­fa — a fu­sion pro­tein de­signed to block both TGF-β and PD-L1 — al­so missed the mark as a sec­ond-line treat­ment of metasta­t­ic bil­iary tract can­cer.

While the Ger­man phar­ma did ob­serve some sin­gle-agent ac­tiv­i­ty, with an ob­jec­tive re­sponse rate of 10.1% as ad­ju­di­cat­ed by an in­de­pen­dent re­view com­mit­tee, it failed to meet the pre-de­fined thresh­old that the com­pa­ny was look­ing for in a reg­u­la­to­ry fil­ing.

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