Baselga is a person apparently who used to work at Memorial Sloan Kettering. This physician was accused of not disclosing all of the payments he was receiving from pharmaceutical companies, admitted to wrongdoing and was ultimately terminated.
He now lead’s Astra Zeneca’s Oncology team as AZ has not been able to come up with strong cancer products for years. AZ’s most recent failure was that for a NSCLC molecule, an a-CTLA4 molecule that failed phase 3. Since Merck and BMS had beat AZ to the PD-1/PDL-1 punch, the hope was a dual therapy using both the a-CTLA4 and PDL-1 would be able to yield better clinical results.
BMS had some limited success and got the FDA nod for the dual therapy for a variety of indications. However, AZ has not been so lucky as they failed for head and neck cancers and they speculate that their aCTLA4 actually intereres with their PDL-1 antibody. The dual therapy did not outperform the current standard chemotherapy treatment. However, they are testing for a wide variety of indications and but things do not look optimistic for them.
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/astrazeneca-s-tremelimumab-fails-another-phase-3-cancer-trial
Medicine: Opinions? 