Clovis Addresses Some Of The Company's Biggest Controversies

Analysts at Leerink maintain an Outperform rating on shares of

Clovis Oncology IncCLVS

with a price target boosted from $85 to $114 after the company hosted a conference call on Monday, which addressed some of the biggest controversies it faces.

Clovis' conference calls came after the company reported encouraging top-line Phase 3 results from a clinical study called ARIEL3 which explored its ovarian cancer fighting therapy, Rubraca (rucaparib).

6 Key Things On Analyst's Radar

Clovis is expected to include rucaparib results from both: 1) investigator-assessed and 2) blinded independent review committee (BRIC) analysis.

Management noted that 33 percent of patients in the study achieved a complete remission in response to platinum-based chemotherapy compared to other trial in 2L maintenance (approximately 50 percent) may "indicate that Rubraca has strong activity in a "real world" patient population."

The ARIEL3 study reported a consistent 5.4 months mPFS for the control arm across all subgroups (5.4 months) which is longer than other trials. This may be an "artifact of evaluating patients by MRI every 3 months (e.g. vs. every 2 months in NOVA)."

A subgroup analysis will be presented at ESMO which looks at the study results when excluding patients with <2cm residual tumor diameter after receiving chemotherapy.

Differences in mPFS duration in the treatment arm between independent and investigator-assessed analyses were also seen in other PARPi trials in this setting. The analyst said, "Hazard rations generated by either analysis were closer, indicating the potl. inaccuracy when looking at only 'one point' on the PFS curve."

Management does not see pending SOLO-1 results in 1L maintenance as "significantly impacting the 2L opp'ty given that SOLO1 is limited to gBRCA+ patients." However, the analyst said, "Important learnings may emerge over time with respect to re-treatment with PARP inhibitors and resistance mechanisms."

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Leerink's Michael Schmidt noted that the conference call also addressed some key controversies:

At last check, shares of Clovis were up 4.07 percent at $91.46. The stock is up over 50 percent since June 16 and 106 percent year to date.

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