For Merck & Co.’s Keytruda, medical conferences have in the past served as platforms to showcase new clinical trophies. But at this year’s European Society for Medical Oncology meeting, the PD-1 king is instead presenting a series of failures on top of a closely watched trial win in collaboration with Seagen and Astellas.
The trial flops that will be featured at ESMO 2022 cover various Keytruda combinations in liver cancer, head and neck cancer, and prostate cancer, raising questions of whether the Merck immunotherapy has reached a bottleneck or if it was just bad luck.
As for the much-anticipated cohort K of the phase 1b/2 EV-103 trial, detailed data will be shared for Padcev monotherapy or a combo of Padcev and Keytruda in newly diagnosed metastatic bladder cancer patients who are ineligible to receive the chemotherapy cisplatin. The readout is not just important to gauge Padcev’s market potential but also interesting in light of Merck’s reported Seagen acquisition discussions, which seems to be falling apart.
Before ESMO 2022 officially raises the curtain, Fierce Pharma caught up with SVB Securities analyst Daina Graybosch, Ph.D., to walk through those important trials and on what to look for in the data and their implications for Keytruda, its competitors and collaborators.
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