Mer­ck KGaA and their part­ners at Pfiz­er have an­oth­er big set­back to re­port for their PD-L1 check­point drug Baven­cio.

The check­point ei­ther alone or in com­bi­na­tion with chemother­a­py failed to hit ei­ther the over­all sur­vival or pro­gres­sion-free sur­vival end­points in their Phase III JAVELIN Ovar­i­an 200 study for drug-re­sis­tant ovar­i­an can­cer. The news comes 9 months af­ter re­searchers al­so re­port­ed a fail for their check­point on sec­ond-line lung can­cer, lead­ing some an­a­lysts to con­clude that their big Baven­cio pro­gram was look­ing like a run­ner-up in the in­tense­ly com­pet­i­tive field.

Lu­ciano Ros­set­ti, Mer­ck KGaA

Baven­cio al­so failed a Phase III study for gas­tric can­cer, putting a crimp in their plans to ramp up sales and rais­ing doubts about their abil­i­ty to com­pete against lead­ers like Mer­ck and Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb.

The haz­ard ra­tio in the lat­est study un­der­scored a mea­ger 5% re­duc­tion in risk on over­all sur­vival for Baven­cio alone and an 11% drop for the com­bi­na­tion arm. That was a flat fail­ure. But re­searchers al­so teased out a pos­i­tive p-val­ue for the com­bi­na­tion arm on pro­gres­sion-free sur­vival.

Key­ing on the pos­i­tive, Mer­ck KGaA R&D chief Lu­ciano Ros­set­ti said that they would con­tin­ue to ex­plore the num­bers.

It hasn’t all been bad news with Baven­cio. Just a cou­ple of months ago their drug came though for re­nal cell car­ci­no­ma pa­tients, set­ting up some speedy ap­pli­ca­tions for mar­ket­ing ap­proval. Re­searchers say it helped PD-L1 ex­press­ing pa­tients and the full pop­u­la­tion, demon­strat­ing a sig­nif­i­cant PFS ben­e­fit com­pared to a con­trol arm treat­ed with Su­tent.

Chris Boshoff

Chris Boshoff, the head of I/O at Pfiz­er Glob­al Prod­uct De­vel­op­ment, had this to say to­day:

We ini­ti­at­ed the JAVELIN Ovar­i­an 200 tri­al as the first Phase III study of a check­point in­hibitor in the plat­inum-re­sis­tant or -re­frac­to­ry set­ting rec­og­niz­ing these pa­tients have the most press­ing need for new treat­ment op­tions. The re­sults speak to the sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges these women face.

One Spanish biotech is beefing up its plasma therapy operations, and on Friday, it announced that it’s doing so in a billion-dollar deal.

Grifols is now the largest shareholder of Biotest, a company valued at more than $1.8 billion. By teaming up, the two will try to increase the number of plasma therapies available and increase patient access around the world, Grifols said in a press release.

The company did so by acquiring holding company Tiancheng Pharmaceutical, the Germany-based owner of nearly 90% of Biotest shares, for nearly $1.27 billion. Grifols now owns nearly 90% of Biotest voting rights and almost 45% of the total share capital of Biotest.

The FDA released briefing documents this week from the agency and Pfizer each outlining their arguments for today’s Covid-19 booster shot adcomm, but one thing conspicuously missing was the question on which panel members would be voting. But late Thursday night, regulators published that question.

Adcomm members will be asked whether or not the safety and efficacy data from Pfizer/BioNTech’s original Phase III study “support approval” of a booster shot at least six months after the second dose in individuals older than 16. The question notably excludes the real-world data from Israel and other analyses that Pfizer and the Biden administration had said would be a centerpiece of their arguments for boosters.

→ Last week we told you about the CMO revolving door at ADC Therapeutics, as Joseph Camardo replaced the departing Jay Feingold. The next opportunity for Feingold in the CMO slot has opened up at antibody-drug conjugate and mAb developer Pyxis Oncology, which has added several new execs and scientific advisory board members in recent months, including ex-Immunovant CFO Pamela Yanchik Connealy. Before his tenure at ADC, Feingold was Daiichi Sankyo’s VP of US medical affairs and chairman of the Global Medical Affairs Oversight Committee. Within weeks in March, Pyxis struck a licensing deal with Pfizer for two of its ADCs and raked in $152 million from a Series B round.

Roche’s Herceptin has long stood as standard of care across multiple advanced cancers, but a suite of next-gen players are looking to beat the aging giant at its own game. In HER2-expressing esophageal cancer, BeiGene partner Zymeworks thinks its bispecific antibody could have the juice to get it done.

Zymeworks’ bispecific antibody zanidatamab, combined with one of two chemotherapy regimens, posted an overall response rate of 75% in patients with advanced gastroesophageal adenocarcinoma (GEA) who had not previously received a HER2-targeted cancer therapy, the Vancouver-based biotech said Thursday.

Gilead is continuing to churn out results for its newly approved drug Trodelvy, and #ESMO21 is the latest stop on the data train.

The biopharma put out new quality of life data in second-line patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer, saying that a sub-analysis from their Phase III study showed significant and clinically meaningful improvements in health-related quality of life over standard of care.