The last Bristol Myers' blog post was wrong on the core thesis
Good news for the world, but not for my portfolio
Oops.
My core thesis on the first Bristol Myer’s blog post was wrong. I thought there would not be a statistically significant survival benefit between the ivonescimab (the PDL1-VEGF bispecific) and a PD1 alone.
The overall survival curves separated further and that separation was statistically significant.
In the latest Harmoni-6 trial, ivonescimab and chemotherapy improved median overall survival time by 4.2 months compared with BeOne Medicines’ Tevimbra and chemo, reaching 27.9 months, after a median follow-up of 21.4 months.
I have to hand it to a few people - including this rather well guessed anonymous twitter account that suggested a 4.5 month survival difference.
There remain doubts about the trial - as expressed most strongly by Dr Julie Brahmer.
Dr Brahmer is the discussant on the ASCO panel and her job is to raise all the legitimate questions posed by the trial. Her doubts are well-explained in the (linked) article from Fierce Pharma.
One particular doubt should be discussed. This was a Chinese trial with Chinese patients and Chinese data.
Adam Feuerstein notes this in this tweet:
In 2015 Chinese trials were dubious. It was commonplace that trials on Chinese data had great looking results - and the same trial was repeated on Americans had lousy results.
This was - in our view - not because Chinese patients were in any way medically different from Western patients, but just another manifestation of Chinese stock fraud. Another variant on the Great China Hustle.
Chinese medical data was routinely faked for stock market manipulation purposes.
Since the Chinese Communist Party in China has dictated that biotech is an important national priority I have thought that this problem has been fixed. Getting your medical trial system right is more important than ripping off a few naive investors.
My guess - and I am prepared to be wrong on this one too - is that Chinese data is okay now. I will wait to see what happens with the American repeat of this trial. I will report that when it happens.
That said - if these results are repeated on the American trials then Akeso/Summit have a drug with a substantial market.
Bristol Myers at the ASCO summit
The core thesis of my blog post was wrong. BioNtech presented phase 2 results on their Bristol joint venture bispecific.
The drug had activity but there was an inverse dose response. Inverse dose responses are usually (but not always) bad news.
There is a long way to go with that drug.
John
shorts (eq,bonds) re-sized?