Roche's big PhI­II Tecen­triq/Cotel­lic com­bo study for colon can­cer fails, dam­ag­ing Ex­elix­is shares

The Tecen­triq team at Roche/Genen­tech has run in­to an­oth­er nasty set­back. Their PD-L1 drug, com­bined with Cotel­lic, failed to make a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence on over­all sur­vival among col­orec­tal can­cer pa­tients in the Phase III study. And the fail­ure will have the biggest im­pact on Roche’s part­ner Ex­elix­is, which had a lot rid­ing on the IM­blaze370 tri­al.

The key les­son for in­ves­ti­ga­tors: The vast ma­jor­i­ty of the pa­tients in the study had mi­crosatel­lite sta­ble tu­mors, and they’re flag­ging the out­come here as fresh ev­i­dence that check­points in gen­er­al won’t have much chance of suc­cess. They had been bank­ing on ear­ly tri­al re­sults in­di­cat­ing that adding a MEK in­hibitor — Cotel­lic — could make a big dif­fer­ence. But that the­o­ry has gone down in flames.

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