Bristol Myers Squibb (BMY)

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Cancer drug war heats up as Big Pharma squares off against Genentech
Jul 26, 2017, 2:48pm PDT Updated Jul 26, 2017, 6:23pm PDT

Ron Leuty
Reporter
San Francisco Business Times

Drug giant Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. filed suit Wednesday against biotech pioneer Genentech Inc., saying the South San Francisco company infringed patents in developing a potential blockbuster cancer immunotherapy drug.

Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) seeks unspecified damages in the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Delaware. At stake are sales of potentially billions of dollars worth of cancer drugs.

The suit centers around the white-hot area of cancer immunotherapy, where cancer patients' own immune systems are tweaked to ramp up their ability to fight tumors. Those therapies have seen response rates of 20 percent or greater in the short term, but researchers have keyed in potential combination therapies to accelerate those rates and extend the time cancers are held back.

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In its suit, BMS says Genentech's cancer fighting drug Tecentriq, or atezolizumab, is "exploiting" patents for the New York-based company's Opdivo, or nivolumab.

Both drugs are used to amp up the immune response: Opdivo, initially approved in 2014 as a treatment for skin cancer, is what's called a PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor, removing the brakes that tumors put on the immune system; PD-L1, a protein Tecentriq targets, is manufactured by cancer cells to cloak themselves from the immune system.

PD-L1 binds to the PD-1 checkpoint, so it is believed to be a way to block that cancer pathway.

Opdivo also has been approved for types of lung and kidney cancers.

Genentech, the U.S. biotech subsidiary of Swiss drug giant Roche, won approval last year of Tecentriq's use in bladder cancer. It also is used to treat non-small cell lung cancer.

BMS has separate suits against AstraZeneca plc (NYSE: AZN) and Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE)/EMD Serono/Merck KGa.

"The purpose of these lawsuits is to seek compensation for the infringement of our intellectual property rights and to protect our immuno-oncology business," BMS spokeswoman Lisa McCormick Lavery said in a statement Wednesday. "In these lawsuits, Bristol-Myers Squibb and our partner, Ono Pharmaceutical, assert that the sale of anti-PD-L1 antibodies in the U.S. will infringe our patents pertaining to the use of anti-PD-L1 antibodies to treat tumors.

"These lawsuits do not seek to interfere with patient access to these products," Lavery said in the emailed statement.
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https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/07/26/genentech-cancer-immunotherapy-bms-bmy-pd-1-pd-l1.html

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