INCY / MRK: I don't disagree per se, but still think it's missing the forest for the trees. If you look across all the posters in indications where they've announced plans for Phase 3 studies (lung, bladder, kidney, head and neck), they have just about 150 efficacy-evaluable pts, and a pooled ORR of 35%. The individual ORRs across these tumors range from 33% to 39%, so there isn't a huge variance across the cohorts.
The sample size in each individual tumor type is small, but the ORR is pretty consistent across all these studies -- about 1.5-2x higher than what you'd expect with PD-1 monotherapy. In most of the posters, they also provided the ORR for pts who received only 1-2 prior lines of therapy (as opposed to 3+ prior lines), and again, if you pool across tumors you still have ~120 pts and the ORR goes up to 39%.
If the NSCLC was all that they'd presented, maybe the "missing" 3 pts would be a bigger deal, and I get that's it's still unusual how they decided to cut the data. And even with 150 pts in these studies, ORR might still come down in bigger Ph3 trials, sure. But I think it's bizarre for AF and others to point to the 3 lung pts and ignore the dozens of pts in other tumor types that showed very consistent activity.
