Bristol-Myers Drug Cocktail Stymies Melanoma Tumors

Two drugs from Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (BMY) shrank tumors in as many as half of patients with advanced melanoma, according to early research that may pave the way for cocktails that trigger the immune system to destroy cancer.

In the study, 52 melanoma patients were simultaneously treated with Bristol-Myers’s melanoma drug Yervoy and nivolumab, its experimental therapy that targets the immune system in a different way. Tumors shrank in 40 percent of patients, and in 53 percent of those who got the most effective dose combination, according to data released yesterday in advance of the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting scheduled to begin May 31.

“The responses are occurring faster and the absolute amount of shrinkage is more than we have seen with either drug alone with this frequency,” said Jedd Wolchok, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and lead author on the study. “What we are seeing that is so impressive is the number of patients that have had very deep responses, their tumor burden decreasing by 80 percent or more.” Tumors disappeared entirely in 10 percent of patients, he said.

Bristol-Myers, Merck & Co. (MRK) and Roche Holding AG are competing to devise new cancer therapies and drug cocktails that use the human immune system to seek and destroy tumor cells. The treatments have the potential to reap billions of dollars in sales while lengthening patient remissions, analysts and oncologists say.

More: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-15/bristol-myers-drug-cocktail-stymies-melanoma-tumors.html

Bristol-Myers Drug Cocktail Stymies Melanoma Tumors

Bristol-Myers Drug Cocktail Stymies Melanoma Tumors

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