Turn­ing cold tu­mors hot, Check­mate Phar­ma out­lines its ini­tial suc­cess sto­ry at #AACR18

Mer­ck wasn’t the on­ly win­ner to emerge at AACR this year. 

Art Krieg’s Check­mate Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals at­tract­ed con­sid­er­able buzz for the biotech’s key proof-of-con­cept da­ta on CMP-001, its TLR9 ag­o­nist de­signed to turn cold tu­mors hot and light them up for a check­point as­sault.

The Cam­bridge, MA-based biotech has gath­ered da­ta on 69 pa­tients in the ITT crowd whose melanoma proved re­sis­tant to a PD-1 as­sault. In that group, they record­ed a 22% ob­jec­tive re­sponse rate with 2 com­plete and 13 par­tial re­spons­es for pa­tients treat­ed with a com­bi­na­tion of the Check­mate drug plus Keytru­da. Giv­en that check­points are gen­er­al­ly ef­fec­tive in about 1 out of 5 cas­es, demon­strat­ing a po­ten­tial to ex­pand the pop­u­la­tion by rough­ly the same amount would be a sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ment in the field — pro­vid­ed the da­ta hold up.

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