This is a bit, from Bloomberg's coverage of the morning's Philly ICSMR meeting, then -- do go read it all -- 81 per cent are showing a continued one year response:
. . .“It looks quite promising,” said Eric Rubin, Merck’s vice president of oncology, in a telephone interview. “At one year, 81 percent of patients are alive, which in an advanced melanoma population is quite striking. Forty percent or less are typically alive at one year. . . .”
Do stay tuned -- a nice data set, all in all, given the severity of the study-patients' conditions. [END, UPDATED PORTION]
While we haven't seen the data sets to be released yet, a prior anonymous commenter asked if there would appear an elevated risk for autoimmune diseases in the MK-3475 co-hort. It is likely that this commenter has scientific reason to ask the question.
It is fair to suggest (as he does) that -- if you have late stage cancer, an elevated risk of a long-term autoimmune disorder may be an acceptable tradeoff -- as death may loom without an oncology therapy regime. Will this data show anything along these lines -- a statistically-significant elevated risk of autoimmune disorders? We will see.
Here is a bit of Merck's press release, from Friday evening:
. . . .Merck will present additional data from patients with advanced melanoma from the Phase IB trial of MK-3475 on Monday, Nov. 18 at the 10th International Congress of the Society for Melanoma Research in Philadelphia. MK-3475 is Merck’s investigational anti-PD-1 immunotherapy. The additional data are from PN001, an ongoing multi-center, single-arm open-label study evaluating MK-3475 monotherapy in more than 1,000 patients with diverse late-stage cancers (metastatic carcinoma), predominantly lung and melanoma. The data to be presented are for patients in the melanoma cohort. . . .
We will report whatever emerges from Philadelphia this morning -- to the extent that any of it contains any surprises.
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