Bristol-Myers Squibb Might Be Close to the "Cure for Cancer Wonder" According to a Phase 1 Study

Well I was wondering why Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY) stock shot up today when the market was down and it might have been due to this finding.

Ipilimumab (Yervoy, Bristol-Myers Squibb) and nivolumab (BMS-936558, Bristol-Myers Squibb) target immune system checkpoints on immune cells, increasing the immune system’s ability to fight off cancer, according to background information provided by researchers.

For their study, Wolchok and colleagues enrolled patients with inoperable stage III and stage IV metastatic melanoma who underwent up to three prior therapies.

Okay so these are some of the worst of the worst skin cancer patients. So the cancer is bad stuff and getting close to killing the person off. It seems when you use both of these hard to pronounce drugs together this happens:

“What was unique in our experience was that most of these responding patients had rapid and deep regressions,” Wolchok said. 

Three out of four patients who responded to concurrent treatment demonstrated tumor reduction within 3 months, a rate faster than that observed with ipilimumab alone, Wolchok said. Sixteen of 52 patients (31%) experienced tumor shrinkage of more than 80%.

“When all concurrent cohorts were considered together, 40% had objective responses,” Wolchok said. “If one broadens this to include patients with slow responses, then 65% of patients have the melanoma controlled with this combination.”

So 65% of the people that took both drugs had the melanoma "controlled." I'm not sure if that is actually cured but I guess it means you won't die from it like in a few weeks or something. Also shrinkage of 80% sounds pretty impressive. I wonder if these people kept taking both drugs it would shrink it even further?

I guess that is what other future studies will show. Also they need to find out how it will work on other types of cancer as well. It's only a Phase 1 study but it might be a pretty good deal for BMY going forward as long as it doesn't have all sorts of side effects and such. Even then 80% tumor shrinkage sound pretty good as far as I can tell.