OncoSec Medical (ONCS), a biotechnology company focused on combination immunotherapies, offered anecdotal evidence last year suggesting its novel approach might help some skin cancer patients who do not benefit from the currently approved class of drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors. What OncoSec lacked was data from a clinical trial to hang its hopes on.
On Tuesday, the company tried to remedy that scientific shortcoming, but the newly released sliver of data on the drug, called Tavo, are frustratingly early and hard to interpret.
How scant? Nine patients with advanced, metastatic melanoma (skin cancer) were treated with a combination of Tavo and Merck’s (MRK) checkpoint inhibitor Keytruda in an ongoing, mid-stage clinical trial. Of these nine patients, two have showed partial tumor responses. These two responses are preliminary, however, because neither of the two patients have been followed long enough to undergo confirmatory scans.
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