Roche's Tecen­triq scores again on a piv­otal front­line lung can­cer tri­al, po­si­tion­ing them against Mer­ck, Bris­tol-My­ers

Roche $RHH­BY nailed some bad­ly need­ed suc­cess in its late-stage cam­paign to build a mar­ket for its PD-L1 drug Tecen­triq to­day, post­ing a win for its Phase III IM­pow­er130 com­bi­na­tion study on both over­all sur­vival as well as pro­gres­sion-free sur­vival for a key group of lung can­cer pa­tients.

Com­bined with chemo and Abrax­ane, in­ves­ti­ga­tors say that the Tecen­triq com­bo sig­nif­i­cant­ly ex­tend­ed the lives of pa­tients in the front­line set­ting for ad­vanced non-squa­mous non-small cell lung can­cer. We won’t get to see da­ta un­til a fu­ture con­fer­ence, but IM­pow­er130 has been wide­ly viewed as crit­i­cal to Roche’s plans in the on­col­o­gy field, where the phar­ma gi­ant has been watch­ing Mer­ck $MRK and Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb make block­buster ad­vances.

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