What Drug Study Flop Means for Merck, Incyte
The failure of their cancer immunotherapy combination is a bigger blow to Incyte than to Merck.
Early data for the combination of Incyte’s IDO inhibitor and Merck’s Keytruda in melanoma was promising, with what looked like slightly better efficacy without the additional side effects that some drug combinations can trigger. Management is still diving deeper to see if there could be some patient subgroups (PD-L1 status, BRAF status, and so on) that did better on the combination. However, given the hazard ratio for the overall study and what we see as similar profiles for PD-1 antibodies Keytruda and Opdivo, we think this bodes poorly for epacadostat’s other phase 3 programs that remain ongoing.
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