NorthWest Biotherapeutics Inc (NWBO)

[hyperopia]

Meanwhile, Merck & Co (USA) is sitting on $11.1B in cash, (as of June 30) will receive a dividend of $8-9B from a spinoff in the beginning of 2021, and “remains highly focused on strategic business development.” There might be a clue as to what the “focus” is from their comments at ASCO 2020 during the Q & A:

Seamus Fernandez – Guggenheim Securities
Roger, just hoping you could comment on what feels like a couple of gaps in your internal development pool, and you’ve been accessing that by buying companies like ArQule. We’re seeing a lot of encouraging early data with point mutation kinase inhibitors. Just hoping you could give us a general sense of the Merck philosophy around kinase inhibitors development there and the ability or Merck’s interest in potentially building out that space. . .

Roger Perlmutter (President of Research)
Right. Thanks, Seamus. I think, first of all, the idea of looking at kinase inhibitors, of course, we are interested in them potentially in our using LENVIMA as a way to probe the protein tyrosine kinase inhibitor field. So field, of course, that I know extremely well and been involved in it for the better part of 40 years. So I have a lot of experience in looking at these molecules. I have to say that the – a lot of our attention has been drawn, of course, to immuno-oncology mechanisms because of what we found with KEYTRUDA. And we’ve naturally gone and asked, well, okay. What can you do to improve KEYTRUDA responses to get beyond where we are? Because we want to do better. And what we’ve learned some things about that, we’ve certainly shown that combinations in a variety of different settings can be helpful.

And that includes a lot of things that just kill tumor cells. So chemotherapy, working cytotoxic agents, traditional chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and, of course, signal transaction targeting agents. And all of them, I think, have similar kinds of effects. We’re interested in them. And what we’re trying to do is improve the benefit risk profile. So where we can find more selective compounds at a fewer adverse effects, in general, my guess is that those things will pair pretty well with KEYTRUDA, and we are interested in those. And we have tried to address them principally by taking advantage of the very large number of companies out there, small and large, that have pursued such things.

So that’s that. I don’t think the answer’s very different for the antibody drug conjugates. Of course, we’ve been doing experiments with these, particularly the EV data that you’ve seen in urothelial cancer is working with Seattle Genetics. And we’re looking at a number of other programs. We set up at the beginning, as you know, a mechanism, and Roy set this up, whereby we can provide KEYTRUDA to lots of people who are doing studies to get an early look at which sorts of things work in combination with KEYTRUDA. And that’s been very helpful to us in terms of targeting licensing opportunities and acquisitions. That’s the general approach we’re taking. And at the high level, I would say, it appears that things that kill malignant cells, maybe because they have a pro-inflammatory effect, perhaps for other reasons, tend to work pretty well in combination with KEYTRUDA.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4351618-mercks-mrk-management-presents-oncology-event-asco-2020-conference-transcript