The com­pet­i­tive land­scape for PD-(L)1xVEGF bis­pecifics is fi­nal­ly tak­ing shape.

For the last cou­ple years, much of the at­ten­tion has fo­cused on Sum­mit Ther­a­peu­tics and its lead drug ivonescimab. Now, two oth­er chal­lengers are revving their en­gines, set­ting up a race that may shape the fu­ture of im­muno-on­col­o­gy. If suc­cess­ful, the com­pa­nies could bring new treat­ments to a pletho­ra of can­cer pa­tients in the next decade.

The biggest im­pact will like­ly be in ar­eas like col­orec­tal can­cer, where PD-(L)1 check­point in­hibitors are not wide­ly used and some ex­perts see un­tapped po­ten­tial. But each bis­pe­cif­ic will al­so be at­tempt­ing to re­place those PD-(L)1 drugs, like Mer­ck’s $30-bil­lion-a-year block­buster Keytru­da, in cer­tain can­cers where they’ve long been the stan­dard.

Alk­er­mes’ quest to de­vel­op a new nar­colep­sy drug be­came murki­er on Wednes­day fol­low­ing an­oth­er Phase 2 read­out.

The com­pa­ny claimed suc­cess, not­ing the 18 mg high dose achieved a sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ment in both pri­ma­ry end­points af­ter eight weeks. This 92-pa­tient tri­al eval­u­at­ed a drug called al­ixorex­ton in pa­tients with nar­colep­sy type 2, which is typ­i­cal­ly less se­vere than nar­colep­sy type 1 but has more var­ied symp­toms. (Alk­er­mes pre­sent­ed Phase 2 da­ta in the type 1 pop­u­la­tion ear­li­er this year.)

But Wednes­day’s re­sults were cloud­ed by an analy­sis that “pre­clud­ed” re­searchers from de­ter­min­ing whether the low­est dose of 10 mg reached sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance, ex­ec­u­tives said on a con­fer­ence call. Alk­er­mes ad­just­ed p-val­ues for all the da­ta points “for mul­ti­plic­i­ty" — lead­ing the tri­al's suc­cess­ful end­points to ap­proach the p<0.05 thresh­old, which means it is bare­ly with­in what’s count­ed as sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant.

Im­mat­ics is plan­ning to ad­vance two T cell re­cep­tor-based bis­pe­cif­ic an­ti­bod­ies based on re­sults re­port­ed Wednes­day across Phase 1 tri­als.

The com­pa­ny’s bis­pe­cif­ic work pre­vi­ous­ly faced ques­tions when Bris­tol My­ers Squibb last year dropped its part­ner­ship on one of those drug can­di­dates, known as IMA401. But Im­mat­ics moved for­ward with its bis­pe­cif­ic plans. And with more da­ta in hand, the biotech's shares IMTX rose 15% on Wednes­day morn­ing.

The com­pa­ny is best known for its lead PRAME cell ther­a­py called anzu-cel, which it is study­ing in sev­er­al melanoma tri­als.

On Wednes­day, Im­mat­ics re­port­ed da­ta on a bis­pe­cif­ic an­ti­body, called IMA402, that is al­so aimed at PRAME. It said 80 pa­tients with var­i­ous sol­id tu­mor can­cers have re­ceived the ex­per­i­men­tal treat­ment at a wide range of dos­es.

Bea­con Biosig­nals is seek­ing to build an ex­pan­sive brain wave dataset to boost the study of new drugs and di­ag­nos­tics for neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­eases, and it now has $86 mil­lion in fresh fund­ing to help reach its goals.

The Boston com­pa­ny is home to a portable de­vice that mea­sures EEG da­ta. Its Se­ries B raise will go to­ward scal­ing up its part­ner­ships with bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies and train­ing AI to gen­er­ate bet­ter bio­mark­ers for neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­eases.

Drug de­vel­op­ment for neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­eases has un­der­gone a