A nice summary. Many large pharma working with check-point...

A nice summary. Many large pharma working with check-point inhibitors, all will be looking at what Amgen and Merck are doing with T-Vec. It makes so much sense!

ALSO, CAVATAK trial included patients who had failed T-Vec, and subsequently responded to CAVATAK, meaning it is not just a "class" effect, and therefore sequential use of Oncolytic viruses possible. Thats big, as the theory is the same for both, but differences in the viruses leads to different responses in these patients. Therefore it may be interesting for Amgen to combine CAVATAK with TVec in a trial, since patients who did not respond well to Tvec did respond to CAVATAK in the trial.

A big bonus for CAVATAK is that it is a natural form of the CVA21 virus, TVec is an engineered-mutated form of herpes virus. Mutated to grow less well, essentially to eliminate the potential for a BAD infection developing in patients. Mutated viruses like this do not multiply as easily, and therefore in theory may be very expensive to manufacture in commercial quantities. Therefore CVA21 should be much easier to manufacture, and therefore cheaper to manufacture, and this is another big deal that the analyst hasn't touched on yet. Ease of manufacture and cost of manufacture are significant factors Pharma will take into consideration when evaluating a Biologic therapy.